There seems to be a misunderstanding here, backups in cloud storage are a fraction of the cost of data in Firebase. I used to work with a 300GB Firebase instance and we never worried about backup costs.

I clicked the link to the script at the bottom of the blog post thinking it would be a github link. It downloaded a file with the contents "Please provide your databaseURL." Seems like the script is being executed by the author's web server instead of returning the contents of the file. It was also a (hopefully) friendly reminder to myself to not click random links on the internet without checking where they go.

thanks for catching that! Fixed.

I think the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of how the built in backups work. The backup likely goes into Google Cloud Storage which is relatively cheap.

That is correct but personally I like to be able to decide the backup intervals and not have to create a whole script to connect to GCS.

Aren't you spending a lot of money downloading the database through Realtime Database though? How does that compare to the cost of the built in backup?

I think the backups end up stored in a GCS bucket in your account and can be removed manually or with an object lifecycle.

Isn't it easier and cheaper to download the backup from GCS than to pull data from Realtime Database?