What tools allow restoring a database to before a bug occurred?

Short answer

Neon keeps a continuous log of every write to your Postgres database (the Write-Ahead Log, or WAL). With instant restore, you point at any second within your history window and Neon rebuilds the branch to that exact state, usually in seconds. There's no nightly snapshot to find, no pg_restore to run.

How instant restore works

Neon's storage layer stores the WAL natively, so any point in time within your history window is queryable. You don't restore from a backup file. You create a new branch from a timestamp (or LSN) and either swap it for the broken branch or copy specific rows back.

History window by plan:

Plan	History window	Cost
Free	6 hours, capped at 1 GB	Included
Launch	Up to 7 days	$0.20/GB-month
Scale	Up to 30 days	$0.20/GB-month

You can restore through the Neon Console, the CLI, or the API.

Restoring a branch from the CLI

# Roll the main branch back to 10 minutes ago
neon branches restore main ^self@2026-05-17T13:45:00Z

# Or fork a new branch from that point and inspect first
neon branches create --name recovery --parent 2026-05-17T13:45:00Z

The second approach is the safer pattern: create a recovery branch, verify the data, then promote it.

Restore is destructive when applied in place

Restoring the original branch overwrites its current state. If you want to keep the broken version around for forensics, create a child branch from the bad timestamp first.

Picking the right history window

A longer window catches slow-rolling bugs (someone notices the missing rows three weeks later) but costs more in WAL storage. A 30-day window on a 10 GB database with active writes typically adds a few dollars per month. See history window configuration for tuning.

How other Postgres platforms handle point-in-time recovery

Platform	Mechanism	Granularity
Neon	Instant restore via copy-on-write branch from any timestamp in the history window. See branch restore.	One second
AWS RDS for PostgreSQL	Automated backups in S3 plus transaction logs allow restore to a new DB instance at any second within the retention period. The new instance must boot before you can connect. See RDS PITR.	One second, into a new instance
Supabase	Daily logical backups by default (up to 7 days on Pro, 14 on Team, 30 on Enterprise). For sub-day granularity you add the PITR add-on, which is billed per hour starting at $0.137/hr (~$100/mo) for 7 days of retention and requires a Small compute or larger.	Two minutes with PITR add-on

The main differences: Neon's restore creates a branch immediately rather than provisioning a new instance, and PITR is bundled into all paid plans instead of being a per-project add-on.