Disaster recovery and backups

Heroic Cloud backs up your database automatically and replicates data across availability zones for production deployments. You don’t configure or schedule this. This page covers what’s protected automatically, what isn’t, and how to request a restore.

High availability and data replication #

Deployments with at least 2 vCPUs run in high availability mode. During a hardware failure, your deployment continues operating — requests keep being served without interruption, and database data is replicated across availability zones.

High availability protects uptime and database continuity. It doesn’t protect in-memory application state. If a node restarts or fails over, any state held in memory — such as active match data — can be lost unless your application handles reconnections and state recovery. This applies even in high availability mode.

Database backups are automatic for all deployments, regardless of vCPU count. See Automatic database backups.

Provision at least 2 Nakama vCPUs to enable high availability. See Scaling for more details.

Automatic database backups #

Heroic Cloud backs up the database every day, storing differential binary backups on a rolling 7-day window. At any given time, you have up to 7 days of recovery points available.

What’s a differential binary backup? #

A differential binary backup works as follows: a full disk snapshot is taken at project creation, and incremental (differential) changes are recorded from that point. This means you can’t selectively query data at a specific point in time — the backups aren’t queryable archives. They exist for infrastructure recovery purposes only.

If you need to query historical data, use the Data export feature to take periodic snapshots you can inspect. For ongoing read-only access, use the database replica add-on.

Restoring data #

The Heroic Labs engineering team manages all backups. Heroic Cloud is a fully managed platform, and the team supports you through any recovery. If you need your data restored to a previous point in time, contact Heroic Labs:

What’s not covered #

  • Development instances don’t have the same backup guarantees as production instances. Don’t use development instances for data you can’t afford to lose.
  • Backups aren’t a replacement for data exports. If you need queryable historical snapshots, use the Data export feature on a schedule that meets your retention needs.

See also #