Litestream author here. The motivation for this docs page was two-fold. First, laying out the different options with their trade-offs helps people understand what Litestream is trying to be so it helps keep my focus narrow. For example, if someone is looking for very high durability guarantees then they can see that rqlite might be a better fit and they don't try to fit Litestream into that mold.
Second, Litestream doesn't interfere with other backup methods so you can run it alongside a cron-based backup. I typically run both because I'm overly paranoid and because it's cheap.
Nice post — one suggestion would be to use zstd instead of gzip though. Out of the box it is much faster and will result in smaller files, and allows tuning to fit inside memory and cpu thresholds different use cases might prefer.
Thanks, I thought about using a different compression tool but everybody knows gzip so I figured I’d keep it simple. Litestream uses LZ4 internally (which is great) but it’s not something a lot of developers come across too often.
For a given compression ratio, zstd compression is faster than gzip by a good margin (even without using multiple threads). And zstd decompression is pretty much always faster than gzip too.
Second, Litestream doesn't interfere with other backup methods so you can run it alongside a cron-based backup. I typically run both because I'm overly paranoid and because it's cheap.