Last updated 13 July 2020

Backups of your data are crucial to any application, not just for recovering in case of a catastrophe, but also for testing, setting up staging environments, and migrating your data. Every professional tier Heroku Postgres database comes with a behind-the-scenes Continuous Protection mechanism for disaster recovery, as well as optional “logical” backups under your direct control.

This article explains how to take manual and scheduled backups, show your existing backups, restore backups, and transfer data directly between two databases.

Creating a backup

By default, pg:backups operates against your primary database, identified by the DATABASE_URL config var:

$ heroku pg:backups:capture --app sushi
Hit Ctrl-C at any time to stop watching progress; the backup will
continue running. Stop a running backup with heroku pg:backups:cancel.

HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_BLACK (DATABASE_URL)  ----backup--->  b251

Running... done

If you have multiple databases on your application, you can choose which one to backup by specifying the database name:

$ heroku pg:backups:capture HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_PINK
Hit Ctrl-C at any time to stop watching progress; the backup will
continue running. Stop a running backup with heroku pg:backups:cancel.

HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_PINK  ----backup--->  b252

Running... done

You can use the flag --verbose to see logs as your backup progresses. If you need to stop a backup for any reason, use the cancel command:

$ heroku pg:backups:cancel

Canceled backup b252

Manual backup retention limits

There is a limit to the number of manual backups that you can retain. That number is based on your database plan.

If you’ve reached this limit and need to take additional backups, the capture command will automatically expire the oldest manual backup before capturing a new one.

Scheduling backups

In addition to manually triggered backups, you can schedule regular automatic backups. These will run daily against the specified database.

$ heroku pg:backups:schedule DATABASE_URL --at '02:00 America/Los_Angeles' --app sushi

The --at option uses a 24 hour clock to indicate the hour of the day that you want the backup to be taken. The --at option also accepts a timezone in either the full TZ format (America/Los_Angeles) or the abbreviation (PST) but we recommend you use the full TZ format.

To stop regular backups, use unschedule:

$ heroku pg:backups:unschedule DATABASE_URL --app sushi

To view current schedules for your app, use:

$ heroku pg:backups:schedules --app sushi
Current backup schedules:
RED: daily at 2:00 (America/Los_Angeles)

Scheduled backups retention limits

Scheduled backups have a different retention policy as compared to the manual backups. This policy is also based on the database plan. For all plans, a daily backup is retained for the last 7 days. That means that 7 backups will exist, one for each of the last 7 days. A weekly backup means that only one backup is saved over a 7 day period. A monthly backup means that only 1 backup is saved over the course of a month. Based on current limits, for example, a Premium-0 would have 12 monthly backups, one for each of the last 12 months.

Downloading your backups

You can create a publicly accessible backup URL with the pg:backups:url command. When the command is specified without a backup id, the latest available backup URL will be returned. This is useful for exporting your data outside of Heroku Postgres:

$ heroku pg:backups:url b001 --app sushi
The following URL will expire at 2015-04-07 18:35:50 +0000:
"http://s3.amazonaws.com/xkpgbackups/app1234567@heroku.com/b004.dump?AWSAccessKeyId=ABCD1234&Expires=1289261668&Signature=3mMBeKISewgEUDT%2FL5mRz4EYS4M%3D"

The pg:backups:url command will output when the time the URL will expire along with the URL itself. If you plan on piping the URL to other commands, pg:backups:url will refrain from adding the expiration information to the output so that all subsequent commands will just have the URL. For example, if I just wanted to list the URL in the terminal without the extra information:

$ heroku pg:backups:url --app sushi | cat
http://s3.amazonaws.com/xkpgbackups/app1234567@heroku.com/b004.dump?AWSAccessKeyId=ABCD1234&Expires=1289261668&Signature=3mMBeKISewgEUDT%2FL5mRz4EYS4M%3D

To download your backup via the command line, you can use the download command:

$ heroku pg:backups:download

Checking backup status

To list your backups, you can run the following:

$ heroku pg:backups --app sushi
=== Backups
ID    Backup Time                Status                              Size    Database
----  -------------------------  ----------------------------------  ------  --------
b013  2015-03-18 19:03:16 +0000  Running                                     IVORY
b011  2015-02-18 17:55:38 +0000  Finished 2015-02-18 17:55:39 +0000  1.9GB   IVORY
b010  2015-02-17 19:14:43 +0000  Finished 2015-02-17 19:14:48 +0000  1.9GB   IVORY
b004  2015-02-11 19:00:55 +0000  Finished 2015-02-17 19:14:48 +0000  1.9GB   IVORY

==== Restores
ID    Restore Time               Status                              Size    Database
----  -------------------------  ----------------------------------  ------  --------
r002  2015-03-16 17:33:19 +0000  Finished 2015-03-16 17:33:19 +0000  1.9GB   IVORY
r001  2015-03-15 12:13:44 +0000  Failed 2015-03-15 12:13:47 +0000    1.7GB   IVORY

To get more detailed information about a given backup, use the info command:

$ heroku pg:backups:info b017 --app sushi
=== Backup info: b017
Database: HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_IVORY
Started:  2013-06-24 17:11.28 UTC
Status:   Running
Type:     Manual
Size:     1.2GB
Schema:   0bff3ac

With the optional --verbose flag, you can also see the logs of the backup in question. If the backup is still running, the command will print the ongoing logs until the backup finishes or you cancel the command by typing CTRL+C.

Deleting backups

You can manually delete a backup to remove obsolete backups or make room for new captures. Use the backup ID to specify which backup to remove.

$ heroku pg:backups:delete b101 --app foo
Deleting b101... done

Restoring backups

To restore a backup, use the restore command:

$ heroku pg:backups:restore b101 DATABASE_URL --app sushi

This will restore backup id b101 to the specified database URL in the app sushi. Note you can omit the backup id to simply restore the latest backup.

You can also restore from a backup on another app (from sushi app to sushi-staging app):

$ heroku pg:backups:restore sushi::b101 DATABASE_URL --app sushi-staging

Or from a publicly accessible URL:

$ heroku pg:backups:restore 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/me/items/mydb.dump' DATABASE_URL -a sushi

Over time, a database will grow on disk due to table bloat and unused index data. As a result, restoring a backup into a new database will almost always result in a reduction in overall disk size as reported by pg:info.

Direct database-to-database copies

In addition to backups and restores, pg:backups also provides the ability to transfer data directly between databases.

To perform such a transfer, run the following:

$ heroku pg:copy COBALT GREEN --app sushi

This would copy all data from the COBALT database to the GREEN database in the sushi app.

You can also transfer directly from a database on another app:

$ heroku pg:copy sushi::ORANGE GREEN --app sushi-staging

This would copy data from the ORANGE database of the sushi app to the GREEN database in sushi-staging. This could be used to copy production data into a staging app for testing purposes.

Visibility

Heroku Postgres needs to connect to your database using your credentials in order to capture a backup. This connection counts against your plan connection limit. You can identify connections made by Heroku Postgres by running the following command from your terminal:

$ heroku pg:psql -c "select * from pg_stat_activity where application_name = 'Heroku Postgres Backups'"