| Feature | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| High availability | Replicas & HA tab | A standby in another zone receives every change. If the primary stops responding, the standby takes over on its own, with the same .internal name, private IP, public endpoint and password. |
| Point-in-time recovery | Backups tab | Keeps every change, so you can restore the database as it was at any second of the days you keep. |
| Restore to a new database | Backups tab | Restores a moment, the latest point or a backup into a new database and leaves this one untouched. |
| Grow storage automatically | Size & flags tab | Grows the disk by 25% (at least 10 GB) as it fills, without stopping, up to the size you set. |
| Maintenance window and Major version upgrade | Settings tab | Announced updates and upgrades wait for your hour. An upgrade takes a backup first and goes back to the old version on its own if it fails. |
High availability
- Open the database’s Replicas & HA tab and click Turn on high availability.
- If you like, choose the standby’s zone. It always runs in another zone than the primary.
- The standby is billed like one more database of the same size.
- A failover closes open connections, which then reconnect (most client libraries do this on their own). Writes from the last few seconds before the primary stopped may not have reached the standby. Turn on Synchronous replication so each commit waits for the standby and a failover loses nothing, at the cost of slightly slower writes.
- Switch to the standby now switches on purpose: writes pause briefly and nothing is lost.
Point-in-time recovery
- On the Backups tab, click Turn on point-in-time recovery and choose how many days to keep. PostgreSQL restarts once.
- To restore, go to Restore to a new database: choose At a moment and the time, Latest available or From a backup, name the new database and click Restore.
- Check the new database, then point your app at it.
Available for primary PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB databases. The space it uses is billed as backup storage, and the new database is billed like any database.
Upgrade the major version
On the Settings tab, set a Maintenance window. Then, under Major version upgrade, choose the version and Now or In the next maintenance window, and click Schedule upgrade. The database can be read but not written during the upgrade, and it can’t go back to the old version once done. Try it first on a copy made with Restore to a new database.