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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T04:04:26+00:00

I’m looking into database backup options for our Heroku rails app, and it looks

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I’m looking into database backup options for our Heroku rails app, and it looks like the free PGBackups add-ons would work well.

However, I’m confused by the options. They are:

Basic - 2 manual back-ups
Plus - 7 manual back-ups
Auto One Week - 7 automatic daily and 2 manual
Auto One Month - 7 automatic daily, 5 automatic weekly, 10 manual

They’re all free. I must be missing something here because I don’t see why you’d choose any but the last option. Is there a downside that I’m missing? What are the pros and cons I’m supposed to be weighing here?

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  1. Editorial Team

    This add on is a bit of a misnomer. For starters, all databases on Heroku are backed up by Heroku and are restorable as part of their disaster recovery processes, so you don’t really need to do your own backups at all to be honest, but better safe than sorry.

    However, peace of mind is a good thing, and if you want your own SQL dumps of your database on a periodic basis then choosing one of these options is up to you. If you’re paranoid, go for the last option. If you’re just running a staging environment, choose the first, it’s up to you.

    Note that the PGBackups dumps go into their S3 buckets, so if you want your own copy you’ll need to then download them from there.

    For more information on what Heroku do out of the box, see here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-documentation#continuous_protection

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