Simon Willison’s Weblog

Litestream: Revamped. I've been running Lightstream in production for Datasette Cloud now for a couple of years and it's worked exactly as advertised - providing a robust and extremely inexpensive streaming backup of SQLite databases to an S3 bucket, with the ability to then perform a point-in-time restore.

I've always wanted the option to use it for read-only replicas as well - it would be great if I could scale read-traffic by running more instances, replicated from those S3 buckets in not-quite-real-time but close.

Ben Johnson and the Litestream team at Fly had an answer for this in the form of LiteFS, but it involves significantly more architectural complexity than Litestream: you needed a custom FUSE filesystem and a Consul server.

Presumably as a result of that complexity Litestrean turned out to be a much more popular project, and now Ben Johnson is revisiting Litestream and building some of those missing features.