Guide

Backing up a Supabase Free-plan project

The Free plan includes zero backups, and idle projects are paused after about a week. If your side project has real users, its only protection is the one you build.

What you're working with

• Free plan: no automated backups. Pro: 7 daily backups. Point-in-time recovery is a paid add-on.
• Inactive free projects are paused — and if that already happened to you, read this first.
• Free egress is limited (about 5 GB/month), so size your backup frequency to your database.

The manual routine

Use the Session Pooler connection (IPv4, port 5432 — why):

# 1. Schema + data, custom format (compressed, restorable per-table)
pg_dump -Fc -f "backup-$(date +%F).dump" \
  "postgresql://postgres.<REF>:<PWD>@aws-0-<REGION>.pooler.supabase.com:5432/postgres"

# 2. Roles (grants live in the dump; role definitions do not)
pg_dumpall --roles-only --no-role-passwords -f roles.sql \
  -d "postgresql://postgres.<REF>:<PWD>@aws-0-<REGION>.pooler.supabase.com:5432/postgres"

What is and isn't inside that dump:

• Included: your tables and data, RLS policies, functions, triggers, the auth schema (your users), Storage metadata.
• Not included: the actual files in Storage buckets (they live in object storage — sync them separately), project settings, edge functions (keep those in git).

Schedule it

A GitHub Actions cron is the zero-infrastructure option (runners are IPv4-only, which is exactly why you need the pooler string):

on:
  schedule: [{cron: "0 3 * * *"}]
jobs:
  backup:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: sudo apt-get install -y postgresql-client-17
      - run: pg_dump -Fc -f backup.dump "${{ secrets.SUPABASE_SESSION_POOLER_URL }}"
      - run: # push backup.dump to your S3/R2 bucket, encrypted

The step everyone skips

A cron that runs is not a backup that restores. Truncated dumps, missing extensions, and version mismatches all produce dumps that look fine in the bucket and fail the night you need them. Restore-test at least monthly: the 5-step drill.

Related fixes: Supabase paused your project — getting your data out Why pg_dump fails through the Transaction Pooler