> Backups, litestream gives you streaming replication to the second.

You seem terribly confused. Backups don't buy you high availability. At best, they buy you disaster recovery. If your node goes down in flames, your users don't continue to get service because you have an external HD with last week's db snapshots.

If anything backups are the key to high availability.

Streaming replication lets you spin up new nodes quickly with sub second dataloss in the event of anything happening to your server. It makes having a warm standby/failover trivial (if your dataset is large enough to warrant it).

If your backups are a week old snapshots, you have bigger problems to worry about than HA.