Data API

building

There are no backups. There is a week of history and a restore that takes seconds.

Backups and restore

There is no backup job, and that is the point. Nothing is dumped at 3am and copied somewhere; the storage keeps every version of every page for the last seven days. Restoring is a pointer moved, not data shipped — it takes seconds on a database of any size.

Restore to a moment

On your production branch, choose a moment in the last seven days and press Restore.

The branch is rewound to how it looked then. Anything written after that moment is no longer on it.

What was there is kept. Before rewinding, the current state is saved as a new branch called before-restore-. So a restore aimed at the wrong moment is not a catastrophe — the thing you were trying to rescue is on that branch, and you can restore again or copy rows out of it.

That branch has no compute to begin with, which keeps a backup nobody is reading from costing anything. Open it and press Start compute to connect to it; delete it when you are sure you no longer need it.

What this covers, and what it does not


A migration that did the wrong thing	Restore to just before it ran
`delete from …` without a `where`	Restore to a minute before
A bad deploy that wrote nonsense for an hour	Restore to before the deploy
A mistake found eight days later	Outside the window — nothing to restore from
Someone deleting the project	30-day window; ask us
Someone deleting the database	Immediate and final. There is no undo

Seven days is the window on our current plan. If you need thirty, ask — it is a setting, and it costs more, because history is storage you are holding.

Taking your own copy

Nothing stops you, and for anything you must keep beyond a week you should:

bash

pg_dump "$DIRECT_URL" -Fc -f backup.dump

Use the direct connection string. That file is yours, restores into any Postgres anywhere, and is the only copy that survives us entirely — which is the honest recommendation for data whose loss would end an argument about whose fault it was.

Branching as a rehearsal

The other use of the same machinery: before a migration, branch production, run the migration on the branch, look at the result. It costs the difference and takes a second, and it is a better answer than a backup because you find out before rather than after.

See branches.