Backups - Neon Docs

Neon does not yet provide support for configuring automated backups in the Neon Console or API. This feature is on our roadmap. You can expect it to be introduced in the coming months. In the meantime, we support the following backup options:

Built-in backups with Neon's point-in-time restore feature

Neon retains a history for all branches, allowing you to restore your data to a particular date and time or Log Sequence Number (LSN). The history retention period is configurable. The supported limits are up to 24 hours for Neon Free Plan users, 7 days for Launch, 14 days for Scale, and 30 days for Business plan users. With this backup option, no action or automation is required. You can restore your data to a past state at any time by creating a database branch, which is a near-instant operation. This feature is referred to as Point-in-time restore.

For information about creating a point-in-time restore branch, see Branching — Point-in-time restore.

pg_dump

You can backup a database using pg_dump, in the same way backups are created for a standalone Postgres instance.

important

Avoid using pg_dump over a pooled Neon connection (see PgBouncer issues 452 & 976 for details). Use an unpooled connection instead.

This method dumps a single database in a single branch of your Neon project. If you need to create backups for multiple databases in multiple branches, you must perform a dump operation for each database in each branch separately.

To dump a database from your Neon project, please refer to the pg_dump instructions in our Migrate data from Postgres with pg_dump and pg_restore guide.

tip

When restoring a database dumped from Neon, you may encounter ALTER OWNER errors related to a cloud_admin role; for example:

pg_restore: error: could not execute query: ERROR: permission denied to change default privileges
Command was: ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES FOR ROLE cloud_admin IN SCHEMA public GRANT ALL ON SEQUENCES TO neon_superuser WITH GRANT OPTION;

This is a protected role in Neon that cannot be modified. To avoid this issue, you can add a -O or --no-owner option to your pg_restore command, as described Database object ownership consideration.

Automate Postgres Backups with a GitHub Action

These blog posts from Neon community members describe how you can schedule a backup to an Amazon S3 storage bucket using a GitHub Action:

Need help?

Join our Discord Server to ask questions or see what others are doing with Neon. Users on paid plans can open a support ticket from the console. For more details, see Getting Support.