In my previous post about unit testing for django, I laid the groundwork for how to unit test any django application. One nice feature that django includes with its test framework is the test database syncing. Even better is if you are using South to do database migrations - it will run the migrations in your test environment for you. However, what if you are using a NoSQL database backend like MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB or something similar and you aren’t using the Django ORM?

One of the big problems with hosting your own database solution is that you have to do backups for it on a regular basis. Not only do you need to do backups for it, but you need to also keep backups offsite. Luckily, Amazon S3 allows a cheap and easy solution for your offsite backups. I found a shell script solution for handling MongoDB backups, but it only does local backups.