Supabase free tier backups: how to make one without a terminal

Your project is on the Supabase free tier, and you have opened Database, then Backups, looking for a list of dated copies to restore from. There is nothing there. No dates, no restore button, only a note about upgrading. The page is not broken. There are no Supabase free tier backups to list, because the plan takes none.

Here is where most answers to this go wrong. They hand you a pg_dump command, which is the correct tool and an instruction you cannot follow: it assumes a terminal, a Postgres installation and a connection string, and you built this app in Lovable or Bolt precisely so you would never need any of the three.

You can get your data out of the dashboard instead. One route takes about ten minutes and gives you your rows. The other takes longer and gives you the database.

Does the Supabase free tier include backups?

No. The free plan takes none at all, and there is no setting that switches them on. Automatic daily backups begin on the Pro plan, and point-in-time recovery is a paid add-on above that.

Which plan you are on is the fact everything else here depends on, and it takes two minutes to check. If you are on the free plan, the only copy of your data is one you made. The rest of this article is how to make one today.

The fastest copy: export your tables to CSV

Open the Table Editor, choose a table, and use the export control above the grid. It offers to download every row as a CSV file, and that file arrives in your downloads folder like anything else.

Then do it again for the next table, and the one after that. The export works on one table at a time, which is the part that usually goes unmentioned: you have to know which tables your app has. The list down the left of the Table Editor is that list, and it is worth reading to the bottom before you start.

Ten minutes of clicking gets you a folder of CSV files holding every row your users have made. As a way of not losing your data this afternoon, that is a good use of ten minutes. What you have at the end of it is a copy of the rows, and only the rows.

What the CSV files leave behind

Five things, and not one of them is a row. A CSV holds the contents of a table and nothing about how that table was built, so what you end up with is a list of what was in the room without any of the shelves.

The last row is the one that surprises people. Your database only ever stored the path to each uploaded file, so a folder of CSVs loaded into a fresh project gives you a table full of links to files that are not there.

This does not make the CSV route worthless. If what you are afraid of is a bad delete on one table, a CSV of that table is the thing you want, and putting a few hundred rows back through the same editor is a job you can do yourself. It is rebuilding the whole project that it cannot do.

While you are looking at your tables: our free scan reads your live site from the outside and tells you which of them answer to a stranger. It takes about 20 seconds and needs no account: scan your app.

A real backup, without opening a terminal

Use a desktop database client. pgAdmin, TablePlus and DBeaver all connect to a Supabase project with a connection string, and all three have a backup or dump command sitting in a menu. What comes out is a full pg_dump file, and you type no commands to get it.

1. In your Supabase dashboard, open Connect and copy a connection string. If the direct one refuses to connect, take the session pooler string instead, which is the one Supabase's own restore instructions use.
2. Paste it into the client as a new connection, with your database password.
3. Find the backup command. In pgAdmin you right-click the database and choose Backup; in TablePlus and DBeaver it is under an export or dump menu.
4. Save the file somewhere that is not only your laptop.

That file holds the room and the shelves: tables, columns, types, indexes, functions and your Row Level Security policies. Of the routes open to you on the free plan it is the only one that can rebuild the project somewhere else, on a different account, on a day when you cannot get into this one. Reading it back is its own job, and how to restore a Supabase backup goes through what a restore replaces and what it leaves broken behind it.

Where the file goes, and how often

Somewhere that is not the same laptop and not the same Supabase account. Those are two different failures: the laptop covers a drive that dies, the account covers a card that expired while you were away, a project suspended, a login nobody can recover. A copy inside the account is behind the same door as the thing it was protecting, which is what three ways to back up a Supabase database compares route by route.

For how often, ask how much you would be prepared to retype. Losing a day of signups is annoying, so a copy each night covers it. Losing an hour of orders means refunding people, and nightly is already too slow for that.

Then load one of your copies into a throwaway Supabase project and open your app against it. That is the only step here that tells you whether the file is any good, and it costs about half an hour.

If you would rather not do this by hand

Then something has to take the copy for you and check it afterwards. That is what Reeve Care does.

• It runs on a schedule, several times a day depending on the plan, whether or not anyone remembers.
• The copy is encrypted and stored outside your Supabase account, so losing the account does not take the backups with it.
• Every copy is read back and counted against what went in. The date your dashboard shows is the last copy that passed that check, never the last one attempted.
• Restoring is a button, and it takes a snapshot of the current state before it starts, so even the restore has an undo.
• Your uploaded files are copied as well, once you connect your Storage buckets.

Keep Supabase's own backups switched on too, the day you move to a paid plan. Two copies in two places is the whole idea. What each plan includes is in the Care pricing table, and the copy, the check and the restore are drawn out step by step on the Supabase backups page.

What to do this week

Do the CSV export before you close this tab. It is the smallest useful thing on the list and it works on the plan you are already on. The 10-minute security checklist covers backups alongside the rest of what is worth confirming on a newly launched app.