What gets backed up
InstaPods backs up your data, not the whole container. The base operating system and installed packages are rebuilt from the preset image, so backups stay small and restores stay fast.
On top of that, any database found in the pod is dumped into the archive first - a managed MySQL, PostgreSQL or Redis service, a database bundled with a 1-Click App, or one you installed yourself. The dump is restored back into the running database when you restore the backup.
Dependency directories are excluded on purpose - they are reinstalled from your lockfile and would otherwise dominate the size of every backup. After restoring a Node.js or Python pod, run
instapods pods reload my-app to reinstall dependencies.How many backups you keep
Retention is per plan, and it’s a count of stored backups per pod. When a new backup pushes a pod over its limit, the oldest one is deleted.
Once you’re at the limit, a manual backup is rejected with a
403 until you delete an old one or move up a plan. Scheduled backups aren’t rejected - they roll the oldest one off automatically.
The automatic schedule
The default schedule runs every 24 hours and keeps as many backups as your plan allows. Open Automatic Backups on the Backups tab to change it: Enable auto-backups turns the schedule on or off, Frequency switches between daily and weekly, and Keep last sets how many to retain. Two behaviours worth knowing:- Stopped pods are skipped. A backup has to run commands inside a live container, so a stopped pod is passed over rather than failing every night. Its existing backups are frozen - nothing is added, and nothing is deleted to make room - so your recovery points survive for as long as the pod is off.
- A backup that captures nothing fails loudly. If a database dump comes back empty or a directory the app was supposed to write to doesn’t exist, the backup is marked failed instead of being recorded as a successful, empty archive.
Taking a backup by hand
- Dashboard
- API
Open the pod, go to the Backups tab and click Create Backup. Type a short note in the Note (optional) field first (“before the v2 upgrade”) to find it again later.The backup runs in the background; the row shows its status and final size when it finishes.
Restoring
Restoring rewinds the pod’s data to the moment the backup was taken.- Dashboard
- API
On the Backups tab, find the backup and click Restore. Confirm the warning. The pod’s services are stopped, the data is replaced, databases are re-imported, and the services are restarted.
/tmp) so you can import it by hand rather than losing it. The pod’s Events tab names the file.
Downloading a backup
You can pull any completed backup out of InstaPods as a.tar.gz, for off-site storage or to inspect it locally.
- Dashboard
- API
On the Backups tab, use the Download action on any completed backup.
Importing a backup
You can upload a backup archive you downloaded earlier and register it against a pod, then restore from it like any other backup. This is how you move data between two pods, or bring back a pod you rebuilt. On the Backups tab, click Import and pick the.tar.gz. Or over the API:
Import the archive into a pod of the same shape as the one it came from. A backup only carries the paths its source pod used, so restoring a Node.js backup into a 1-Click App pod puts files where nothing will read them.