Postgres failures happen. Long restores make them worse.
We surveyed 50 developers managing 1TB+ Postgres databases in production. We asked them about failures, recovery times, and business impact. Here’s what they told us.
Download raw survey resultsKey insights
- 59%
of companies experienced a critical production failure in the past 12 months. Including hardware failures, accidental table drop, or data corruption.
Large-scale Postgres failures are not rare events. More than half of teams running multi-TB Postgres encountered a serious failure over the last year.
- 30%
of teams had 3+ hours of downtime — and some pushed past half a day. Only 21% recovered in less than 60 minutes.
Traditional restore methods (e.g., snapshot + WAL replay) often drags on as database size climbs into the TBs.
- 40%
reported significant business interruptions caused by the incident. Only 8% reported little to no stress or disruption to their operations.
Disruptions affect everything from user satisfaction to internal deliverables — a headache for both development teams and the broader business.
- 52%
of companies experienced negative customer feedback due to the incident. 48% reported a huge spike in support cases. 26% had to deal with breach of SLAs and penalties.
Prolonged downtimes are more than a technical inconvenience — they're a threat to revenue & customer trust.
- 72%
of teams are merely somewhat confident in their ability to quickly recover from failure. Even among teams that successfully recovered, only 21% feel very confident.
Developers’ confidence in their current backup/restore solutions is shaky. There’s room for improvement in the experience.
Recovery horror stories
We had an admin drop a crucial table (accidentally) as a result of a typo in the sql command. Took 2h to restore operations.
Staff Software Engineer from aSaaS company
Team:5k-10kWe experienced power loss and brownout recovery corrupted our local hot backup. Had to build a whole new machine and try to recover data. Took a week.
Senior Software Developer from aSaaS company
Team:51–200A database failure caused a significant performance degradation, leading to slow response times for critical applications for around 16-20 hours. The internal team faced mounting pressure, working extended hours to identify the issue, restore backups, and mitigate further delays, resulting in high stress and disrupted workflows across development and operations teams.
DevOps Engineer from aSemiconductors company
Team:10k+A certain table record got all cleared during our night shift. Due to being night shift production was not really affected, but getting IT and others to support was difficult. Our audits logs did not record the issue, so we had to go backups.
Software Engineer from aHealthcare company
Team:51–200Our biggest problem was that our HA standbys were lagging, so when we tried to failover, it wasn’t ready to take over immediately. On top of that, the recovery process was way too manual, which slowed everything down even more. It really highlighted how much we needed to test our end-to-end recovery process better.
CEO of aSaaS startup
Team:<10
68% of teams requested faster point-in-time recovery solutions
Faster restores are essential for increasing team confidence and reducing customer impact.
Reduce your recovery time from hours to seconds
Neon is a Postgres platform that supports instant PITR — even for multi-TB databases.
Restoring large Postgres databases can take hours with snapshots and WAL. HA standbys help with infra issues but not with drops, corruption, or lagging replicas.
Neon takes a fundamentally different approach to recovery.
The magic trick? Instant branching. Neon lets you instantly branch from any past state — no WAL replay or full restore needed. It references existing storage at a specific moment, making recovery instant. Spin up a branch, recover data, and merge it back — all without downtime.
Want to see it in action? Here's a demo →