What Sentinel is

Sentinel is an open-source command-line tool for automated database backup, restore, and disaster recovery. You point it at a YAML file describing your databases, your storage, and your schedule, and it takes care of the rest; running dumps, uploading them, verifying their integrity, expiring old ones, and telling you when something breaks.

It is a single binary with no server, no agent, and no control plane. If it is running, it is because cron or your scheduler started it.

Supported databases

Engine	Full backup	Incremental	Point-in-time recovery
PostgreSQL	Yes	Yes: write-ahead log, PostgreSQL 17+	Yes
MySQL	Yes	Yes: binary logs	Yes, to a target timestamp
MariaDB	Yes	Yes: binary logs	Yes, to a target timestamp
MongoDB	Yes	Yes: oplog	Bounded by the oplog window

What it does

• Backup and restore across all four engines, from a single configuration file.
• Storage anywhere: a local directory, S3-compatible object storage, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, or Azure Blob Storage.
• Incremental backup using each engine's own change log, so daily backups do not mean daily full dumps.
• Advanced restore: PostgreSQL point-in-time recovery and incremental chain assembly.
• Scheduling: a built-in cron loop that runs both backup and restore jobs.
• Retention: automatic expiry by count, by age, or by grandfather-father-son tiers.
• Monitoring: every execution recorded in a local SQLite history you can query and export.
• Notifications: Slack, Discord, email, and generic webhooks.
• Integrity and encryption: SHA-256 manifests on every artifact, and opt-in AES-256 encryption.

What it deliberately does not do

Knowing the boundaries early saves you evaluating it for the wrong job.

• It is not a replication or high-availability tool. Sentinel takes point-in-time copies. It does not keep a standby in sync, and it will not fail your application over.
• It does not run a server. There is no daemon holding state, no web UI, and no API. The scheduler is a foreground process you supervise like any other.
• It does not install your database client tools. pg_dump, mysqldump, mongodump and their restore counterparts must already be on your PATH. Sentinel orchestrates them; it does not reimplement them.
• It does not manage your secrets. It reads credentials from environment variables and secrets files that you provision. It will never accept a password as a command-line argument.
• It is not a database migration tool. Schema change management is somebody else's job.

Where to go next

• Installation: get the binary and verify it is genuine.
• Quickstart: one backup and one verified restore, from nothing.
• How Sentinel fits together: the mental model, before you go deeper.