SQLite Backup Strategy for Production SaaS: WAL, Litestream, Recovery Tests (opens in new tab)

Running SQLite in production for a multi-tenant SaaS means giving up the operational comfort of a managed database. No automatic backups, no point-in-time recovery dashboards, no on-call DBA. You build all of that yourself, or you find out the hard way during your first incident. We've been running SQLite for HelperX — 200+ slot databases plus a global database — for over a year. In that time we've had two real recovery events and a few dozen test recoveries. Here's the backup architecture th...