Workflow: point-in-time disaster recovery drill

Workflow: point-in-time disaster recovery drill

TL;DR

Prove you can recover to a point in time, and learn the exact clicks, before a real incident. The drill completes inside your recovery time objective, and the runbook now has the exact commands, not guesses.

Use this when you run into the situation in the title.

When not to use this skill: unrelated tasks. It covers only the procedure above.

Steps

1. Pick a drill timestamp in the recent past, inside your history window.

2. Use Time Travel Assist to open a read-only connection at that timestamp. Run the queries that define "correct": row counts on critical tables, the specific records the drill scenario "lost".

   Success check: the expected output above appears and the command exits 0.

3. Instant-restore the root branch to that timestamp (Console, CLI, or API). Remember: only root branches support instant restore.

4. Neon renames the original to [branch]_old_head_[timestamp] and keeps it. The restored data is on a new branch that becomes a root branch.

   Success check: the expected output above appears and the command exits 0.

5. Verify against the restored branch with the same queries from step 2.
6. Repoint a staging app at the restored branch and smoke-test.

7. Delete the drill branches (restored + old_head backup) to stop their storage cost.

   Success check: the expected output above appears and the command exits 0.

Compatibility

The steps above apply to the commands named in them. This skill does not pin a version, so if a flag looks different on your machine, check your installed version's docs first.

Details

Workflow: disaster recovery drill with instant restore

Goal

Ordering constraints

• Verify the timestamp with Time Travel Assist before restoring; restoring to the wrong moment costs a second restore cycle.
• Keep the _old_head_ backup until verification passes; it is your undo.

Traps

• Child branches cannot be instant-restored: run the drill on the branch you would actually restore in production.
• A timestamp older than the history window silently cannot be reached; check the window first (Free: 6h, Launch: up to 7d, Scale: up to 30d).
• After a real restore, every app pointing at the old branch name needs its connection string updated.

Verify

Neon's instant restore docs (verified live 2026-09-26): root-branch-only restore, Time Travel Assist to confirm the restore point, the oldhead_timestamp backup branch kept for rollback; history window docs give the per-plan reach limits.