Backups

On Starter, Pro, and Business plans, Prisma Postgres automatically creates snapshots of your database to support recovery and backup workflows. Navigate to the Backups tab of your Prisma Postgres instance in the Prisma Console to view and re-instantiate your available backups.

Snapshots are created daily, but only on days when the database has activity. Depending on your plan, you will see a different number of available snapshots:

Database changes or events that occurred after the most recent snapshot may not be restored.

For more details about backup availability and plan-specific features, visit our pricing page.

If you would like to create a backup file of your database, you can use pg_dump with a direct connection. This is useful for migrating data between databases or creating a local copy of your database.

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• Node.js installed (version 16 or higher).
• PostgreSQL CLI Tools (pg_dump) for creating backups. Use Postgres version 17 as Prisma Postgres is based on this version.
• A direct connection string for your Prisma Postgres database.

To create backups, ensure you have the PostgreSQL command-line tools installed. Run the following commands based on your operating system:

brew install postgresql@17

which pg_dump

which pg_restore

# Download from the official PostgreSQL website:
# https://www.postgresql.org/download/windows/
# During installation, select "Command Line Tools".
# Then verify with:

where pg_dump
where pg_restore

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install postgresql-client-17
which pg_dump
which pg_restore

Get your direct connection string by following Connecting to your database.

You can now dump the database by running the following command and using your own connection string:

pg_dump --dbname="postgres://USER:PASSWORD@db.prisma.io:5432/?sslmode=require" > ./mydatabase.bak

This will create your backup file named mydatabase.bak in the current directory.