What is point-in-time recovery (PITR)?
The difference between losing a day of your customers' data and losing a few seconds of it.
In short
Point-in-time recovery (PITR) is a way of restoring a database to its exact state at any chosen moment, such as one minute before a bad deploy, rather than only to the last scheduled backup. It works by keeping a base backup plus a continuous record of every change since, and replaying that record up to the moment you pick.
Also called: PITR, Continuous backup
Why it matters when your prototype goes to production
Daily backups sound safe until you work out what they mean: if something goes wrong at 5pm, restoring last night's backup loses everything since. Supabase's documentation says it directly: even with daily backups, you could still lose a day's worth of data. With PITR you restore to a moment, not to a day.
The common causes are rarely dramatic: a migration that dropped the wrong column, a bug that overwrote records, a script run against the wrong project. For all of them, the question is how far back you have to go.
RPO and RTO
| Term | Question it answers | Daily backups | PITR |
|---|---|---|---|
| RPO (recovery point objective) | How much data can we lose? | Up to a day | Seconds to minutes |
| RTO (recovery time objective) | How long can we be down? | Time to restore | Time to restore |
Whatever you choose, restore once on purpose before you need to. A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a plan.
Common questions
Does Supabase include point-in-time recovery?
Supabase backs up paid-plan projects daily and offers point-in-time recovery as an option for restoring to any moment, down to seconds. Check your plan in its dashboard.
Related terms
Sources
More on this: Production architecture & security · All glossary terms
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