Disaster Recovery & Point-in-time recovery (PITR)

Hydra uses industry-standard practices to ensure your data is backed up and recoverable.

Disaster Recovery

All Hydra plans are monitored continuously by our infrastructure and will automatically recover in the case of hardware failure. All Pro plans have the option of high availability which allow seamless instant recovery should there be a failure. Plans without HA will typically experience 5-10 minutes of downtime while replacement infrastructure is provisioned.

In addition, WAL (write-ahead logs) are backed up to an encrypted S3 bucket for 7 days, providing 11 9s (99.999999999%) durability. Should there be a need to restore your data from backup, we can restore your data to any point in the last 7 days. Should you need this service, please open a support ticket.

Point-in-time Recovery, Hydra Cloud

Point-in-time recovery (PITR) is a method of restoring a database to a specific point in time. This can be useful in situations where data has been accidentally deleted or corrupted, or if you need to undo a series of changes that were made to the database.

With Hydra, PITR is achieved through the use of continuous archiving and WAL (write-ahead logging). Continuous archiving involves constantly copying transaction log files (WAL files) to a remote location as they are generated. This allows us to restore the database to any point in time by replaying the WAL files up to the desired point.

To restore your database to a point-in-time create a support ticket from the Hydra dashboard that includes the following:

• Database name

• Database plan size

• Timestamp (date, hour, and timezone) you would like to restore to

Note that recovery takes approximately 1 hour per 100 GB of data.

Self-managed PITR (Hydra open source users)

To set up PITR with Hydra open source, you will first need to enable WAL archiving by modifying the postgresql.conf configuration file and setting the wal_level parameter to archive. You also need to specify the location where the WAL files should be stored using the archive_mode and archive_command parameters.

Once continuous archiving is enabled, you can use the pg_basebackup command to create a backup of the current database, including the WAL files. This backup can then be restored using the pg_restore command, along with the --recovery-target option to specify the point in time to which you want to restore the database.

PITR can be a valuable tool for protecting your database against data loss and ensuring that you can always recover from unexpected events. However, it's important to regularly test your PITR setup to ensure that it is working properly and that you can restore the database to the desired point in time.