Alexander Renz
Solo operator behind Resistro and Resistro Cloud. I build this because I kept being the person on-call when somebody's pg_dump cron job turned out to have produced truncated files for months.
- Role
- Founder, backup engineer, everything in between.
- Based
- Krailling (near Munich), Bavaria.
- Languages
- Deutsch · English (engagement docs in either).
- Stack
- Go, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, Ansible, Linux ops, object-storage backends.
- Contact
- hello@… · enterprise@…
Why this exists
I operate a small fleet of my own production services — mail, chat, web, a handful of databases. The backup story across those hosts was always the same: a cron job nobody checks, a storage box nobody tests, a restore procedure nobody has ever actually run. That's not a rare situation. It's the default.
Resistro started as the tool I wanted for my own hosts: one binary, obvious CLI, Prometheus exporter, restore verification you can cron. Resistro Cloud exists so the monitoring and off-site storage layer isn't another home-grown piece of infrastructure for everyone to reinvent.
What I work on today
- Resistro — open-source, Apache 2.0. Postgres / MySQL / MariaDB backup daemon in Go. Deployed on my own production fleet (mail, chat, DB, app hosts).
- Resistro Cloud — managed monitoring, encrypted off-site storage, per-tenant rate limits, EU-only data path. Engagements usually touch this.
- Ops fleet — ~13 hosts across Hetzner & home DC, Ansible-driven, production XMPP server (Zerta), mail infra, monitoring.
What I won't claim
No PhD in distributed systems. No enterprise-consultancy pedigree. No 12-logo "trusted by" wall.
What I do have is years of being the one who wakes up when the primary dies, who restores from backup under pressure, who explains to a non-technical board why the last six months of backups were subtly corrupt. That's the knowledge that ends up in the runbook you pay for.
How I work
- Fixed-price wherever it fits. Open-ended retainers breed scope creep. An audit is an audit, a drill is a drill.
- Written scope before payment. If we can't agree on exact deliverables, we don't have an engagement.
- Not everything is backup. I'll tell you when your problem is really connection-pool sizing or a missing replica and I'm the wrong person to hire.
- Remote-first, DACH-on-site welcome. Remote delivers the same outcome faster. On-site if the room matters for the engagement (board presentation, tabletop DR exercise).
What a scoping call sounds like
30 minutes. You describe what you run, what hurts, where you think the risk is. I ask specific questions: what's your current RPO, when did you last restore, who owns the key to the backup store. By the end I either send a fixed-price scope or I tell you this isn't where I can add value and suggest someone better suited. No sales deck.