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Restore from a backup

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Every managed database is backed up each night at about 02:00 Lagos time, and each backup is kept for 7 days. Backups are included in the database price. Restoring replaces the database with the state it had when the backup ran.

1. Find the backup you need

Open Backups & snapshots and look for your database in the Backups tab, or list them from the CLI. Pick the newest backup taken before the problem started.

Terminal

simplicloud db backups list orders-db
# DATE          TIME   SIZE
# 14 Nov 2026   02:00  3.1 GB
# 13 Nov 2026   02:00  3.1 GB
# 12 Nov 2026   02:00  3.0 GB
# ...           (7 days kept)

2. Decide: restore in place or copy data out

A restore replaces the whole database. Anything written since the backup ran is lost, across every database on that server. If you only need a few rows back, take a dump of the current state first and compare afterwards.

You want to	Do this
Undo a bad migration or a mass delete	Restore in place from last night's backup
Recover one table	Snapshot first, restore, `pg_dump` the table, then restore the snapshot
Keep a copy for longer than 7 days	Take a snapshot (kept until you delete it) or `pg_dump` to Spaces

Point-in-time restore and read replicas are coming next. Until then, nightly backups are the restore points.

3. Restore

Choose Restore next to the backup. The dialog offers to take a snapshot of the current state first; leave it ticked unless you are sure. A snapshot costs about ₦85 a month until you delete it.

The database restarts and is back in about 3 minutes. Apps reconnect on their own if their driver retries; otherwise redeploy them.

Terminal

simplicloud db restore orders-db --backup 2026-11-13 --snapshot-first
# Snapshot orders-db-before-restore taken.
# Restoring orders-db from 13 Nov 02:00. About 3 minutes.

A restore can't be undone, except from the snapshot you took first. Tell your team before you start, and pause deploys that run migrations.

4. Keep your own long-term copies

For monthly archives or compliance, dump the database from a server and copy it to a private Spaces bucket. Spaces gives you 250 GB for ₦6,750 a month.

Terminal

pg_dump "$DATABASE_URL" -Fc -f orders-$(date +%F).dump
aws --endpoint-url https://spaces.simplicloud.ai \
  s3 cp orders-$(date +%F).dump s3://kora-backups/db/

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Restore from a backup

1. Find the backup you need

2. Decide: restore in place or copy data out

3. Restore

4. Keep your own long-term copies

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