A few months ago I have rolled out my own version of docker-ized discourse and for backups I enabled WAL-E:
WAL-E turned out not to be so great for my scenario. After few months I ended up with pretty high S3 bills for storage (~$60/mo) - I didn’t setup auto deletion of old backups and I wasn’t really sure if my backups are still reconstructible after deleting older files. WAL-E creates tons of incremental files and it is not obvious if all is still ok. I happily switched to discourse_docker maintained by discourse devs with easily understandable nightly backups.
But of course I’m not against optional WAL-E switch for people who demand continuous backups.
That’s crazy! In addition to incremental backups you need to take periodical base backups. If you do a base backup every night and delete the old incremental backups your total backup size should be marginally bigger than with just the nightly (base) backups. There is no need to keep the old incremental backups after you have created a new base backup.
Anyway, thanks for the docker stuff. For anyone else using that, please add a crontab entry for base backups and remember to set a S3 rule for deleting old stuff.