LLM Best Practices

Supabase backups: PITR and pg_dump

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Overview

Supabase includes automatic daily backups on paid plans, but those backups live inside Supabase’s infrastructure and restore on Supabase’s terms. Pair point-in-time recovery (PITR) for a short recovery point with nightly logical pg_dump exports that you store yourself. This page covers both for Supabase specifically. Setting RPO and RTO targets, backing up secrets, and running restore drills are covered in disaster-recovery; generic Postgres backup and WAL archiving are in postgres-prod.

Enable PITR when the RPO is shorter than a day

Supabase PITR streams WAL segments to object storage, allowing restore to any second within the retention window (roughly a two-minute RPO in the worst case). It is an add-on on Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans, and the project must also run at least a Small compute add-on. Enable it under Dashboard > Settings > Add-ons. Pricing scales with the retention window, starting at $100/month for 7 days (checked September 2026) and rising for 14- and 28-day windows; confirm current rates on the Supabase pricing page. To restore in place, go to Dashboard > Project > Settings > Database > Backups > Point-in-Time, select the target timestamp, and confirm. The project is inaccessible during the restore; plan for downtime proportional to database size. Supabase also offers a “Restore to a New Project” option that creates a separate copy without downtime on the source project; prefer it when you need to inspect or recover a subset of data rather than roll back everything. (Supabase PITR docs)

Export nightly logical dumps to storage you control

A logical pg_dump complements PITR by producing portable snapshots you can move to a separate account. Run a nightly dump and compress the output:

pg_dump "$DATABASE_URL" \
  --format=custom \
  --compress=9 \
  --file="backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).dump"

Retain daily dumps for 30 days, weekly dumps for 90 days. Store them in a bucket under a separate cloud account; see hostinger-vps-backups for the restic-to-B2 pattern that applies equally here.

Test that a dump restores with pg_restore into a scratch database; a dump file that has never been restored is unverified. See postgres for pg_restore flags.

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