Not completely unreasonable I recall that someone figured out how to bypass the Netflix DRM several months back . With that said , you are right in saying the customer is the one that gets shafted with poor service while pirates DGAF about it . <| sep |> Postgres is a transactional database . Every operation done to the data is a transaction that is logged by design . This allows the db to keep a separate and smaller transaction log file instead of always writing to the main database file which would increase fragmentation and is slow . Transaction logs are rolled into the main db file whenever a full backup is done assuming it ' s like mssql which I ' m more familiar with . You can restore to any point in time over a transaction log , and then to any point in time you have a full backup . Full backups are big and take a while so , for example , or procedure at my work is to keep 3 months of weekly full backups , and daily or even hourly transaction log backups for the last week or two . Also storing the edit history is super trivial . Just create a history table and the appropriate triggers to insert the data automatically . Could be done entirely in the db with no server code changed