Backups

See Deploy → Backups & restore for the snapshot mechanism behind these endpoints.

Method & path	Summary
GET /backups	List archives, newest first
POST /backups	Take a fresh backup now
POST /backups/upload	Upload an existing archive
GET /backups/storage-info	Which store backups are written to
GET /backups/{key}	Download one archive
DELETE /backups/{key}	Delete one archive
POST /backups/{key}/restore	Restore from an archive

POST /backups

Body optional: { "name": "custom-name.zip" } — defaults to PocketBase’s own pb_backup_YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.zip pattern. A ZIP of a consistent snapshot of the main database (data.db on SQLite, data.pgdump on Postgres — see Deploy → Backups & restore for the Postgres requirements), the auxiliary (logs) database, and the local-disk storage tree when files aren’t on S3. 204 on success.

GET /backups/storage-info

{
  "driver": "local",
  "location": "/app/data/backups",
  "lastScheduled": { "at": "2026-09-24 03:00:00.000Z", "ok": false, "message": "..." }
}

lastScheduled is only present once settings.backups.cron has fired at least once, and message only on a failed run.

GET /backups/{key} — authenticated by query token, not bearer

GET /backups/pb_backup_20250115103000.zip?token=<file-token>

Uses a superuser file token (from POST /files/token) in the query string, not Authorization — the same reason ordinary protected file downloads do: a browser <a download>/window.open can’t set headers.

POST /backups/{key}/restore

Extracts and validates the archive, then — on SQLite — swaps the data directory, or — on Postgres — runs pg_restore --clean --if-exists --single-transaction against the live database, and either way re-execs the current binary with the same arguments. The process id survives (a supervisor sees no crash), but every open connection is dropped, and the swap/restore happens after this endpoint has already answered 204. Restoring a SQLite archive onto Postgres (or vice versa) is rejected with 400 before anything is touched. This is the one conformance-suite test that’s permanently skipped rather than run against a live server — see Compatibility.