I'm not so much looking for efficiency, but for simplicity. This contraption of scripts that get called by cronjobs, that then access some account on DigitalOcean etc. just seems to complex to me.

If I want to check if everything works, I have to check several places. My own documentation of this backup process is several pages long.

Considering how many people need to backup databases on linux, I was hoping there'd be a better, simpler practice.