Database / Supabase Intermediate to Advanced Interview Questions
What is the difference between daily backups and Point-in-Time Recovery in Supabase?
Daily backups are full snapshots of the database taken once a day and retained for a set window depending on plan tier; restoring from one returns the database to exactly the state it was in at that snapshot's timestamp, so anything written after it is lost.
| Daily Backups | Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) |
| Restores to a fixed daily snapshot | Restores to any second within the retention window |
| Simpler, included on most tiers | Uses continuous WAL archiving, needs a higher tier |
PITR instead continuously archives the database's write-ahead log (WAL), so a restore can target any specific second within the retention window — useful when an incident (like a bad migration or an accidental mass-delete) happened at a known time and you want to recover to just before it, rather than losing an entire day's writes.
More Related questions...