Backups & recovery

Automated backups, retention policy configuration, and in-platform restore for SurrealDB Cloud.

SurrealDB Cloud provides managed backups so you can recover from mistakes or the need to clone an instance — without operating your own backup infrastructure. The same backup and restore experience applies to Start and Scale instances. Backups are stored and restored inside Cloud; you cannot download or extract backup files to your own storage today.

Important

Automated backups are not available on free instances. Upgrade to a paid Start or Scale plan to enable scheduled backups and restore.

Backup retention policy

Paid instances use a tiered retention policy you can configure per instance. Each tier keeps snapshots for a set period before they expire:

Tier	Schedule	What you configure
Daily	Automated every day	How many days of daily snapshots to keep
Weekly	Snapshot each Sunday	How many weeks of weekly snapshots to keep
Monthly	Snapshot on the 1st of each month	How many months of monthly snapshots to keep

To change retention, open the instance in Surrealist, go to Settings → Backups, and open Backup retention. Adjust the values for each tier within the allowed range shown in the UI, then save.

Some tiers may be fixed on your current plan (not editable in the console). If you need longer retention than your plan allows, contact SurrealDB support from the same screen.

Longer retention improves recoverability but increases storage use and cost. Align retention with compliance and recovery objectives.

On-demand backups

You can also trigger on-demand backups before risky changes (for example a major version upgrade). These appear alongside scheduled snapshots in the instance backup list.

Restoring from a backup

Restore is an in-platform operation:

Open the instance backups list in Surrealist or the Cloud dashboard.
Select the snapshot to restore from.
Choose Create from selected (or pick the backup when creating a new instance).

This provisions a new instance from the backup. You cannot restore into the same instance in place.

Common constraints:

Source and restore instances must be in the same region.
Restore target storage size must be equal to or greater than the source.
Restored instances must use a compatible SurrealDB version for that backup (the UI shows valid versions).

Step-by-step screenshots and the create-instance flow are in Data export and backup.

What backups are not

Not downloadable — backup snapshots are not exposed as files you can copy to S3, your laptop, or another cloud. Recovery is through Cloud restore only.
Not a substitute for logical export — if you need a portable .surql or data file outside Cloud, use surreal export against a running instance (see Migrating data).

Operational detail

For migration runbooks and related operations topics, see SurrealDB Cloud operations.