How do you actually back up your Supabase project — and have you ever restored one?
I've been running a product on Supabase for a while now — Postgres, plus a decent amount of Storage — and I had a bit of a scare recently that made me finally look properly into backups.
I realized there were a few things I kind of knew in theory, but hadn’t really internalized:
- Pro daily backups only keep 7 days.
- Those backups don’t include the actual Storage files. The database backup includes storage.objects, so you get the metadata rows, but not the files sitting in the buckets. Which means a restore could technically give you a bunch of file references pointing to nothing.
- PITR is an extra $100/month per project.
- If the project itself gets deleted, the managed backups are gone too.
To be clear, none of this is hidden. It’s in the docs. I just hadn’t really thought through what it would mean in a real “oh no, we need to restore everything” situation.
And that made me realize my backup strategy was basically: “Supabase probably has this covered.”
Which… maybe not a strategy.
So I’m curious what people are actually doing in production:
- Are you just relying on Supabase Pro backups? Paying for PITR? Running your own pg_dump cron? Using SimpleBackups or something similar? Or, honestly, doing nothing?
- If you handle backups yourself, how are you backing up Storage files alongside the database?
- More importantly: have you ever actually restored a Supabase project into a fresh project and verified that everything came back clean?
- For people managing multiple client projects — agencies, freelancers, consultants — how do you keep backup policies straight across all of them? And are clients expecting you to be responsible if data gets lost?
I’m not trying to sell anything here. I’m just trying to build a backup setup I’d actually trust.
Would really appreciate hearing what’s worked, what didn’t, and especially any horror stories from people who’ve had to restore for real.