GUIDES / RAILWAY → S3

How to back up Railway Postgres to Amazon S3

RESTORE-TESTED · ENCRYPTED · IN A BUCKET YOU OWN

Railway keeps your database running, but its snapshots live in the same account and region as the database itself. An off-site copy in your own Amazon S3 bucket protects you from the failures the platform can't: a bad migration, a locked account, or a compliance question you need a real answer to. Here's how to set it up in a few minutes — and, crucially, how to know the backup actually restores.

Step 1 — Get your Railway connection string

Railway project → your Postgres service → Variables tab → DATABASE_URL (or the public proxy URL under Connect).

Use the public connection URL (the TCP proxy host Railway exposes), not the internal .railway.internal hostname — that one only resolves inside Railway's network and we can't reach it from outside.

A read-only role is all you need. The exact CREATE ROLE SQL is on the security page.

Step 2 — Create a Amazon S3 bucket and access keys

  1. In the S3 console, create a bucket (block all public access — backups should never be public).
  2. Create an IAM user with programmatic access and the S3 policy above.
  3. Copy the access key ID and secret access key.

Create an IAM user with programmatic access and a policy granting s3:PutObject, s3:GetObject, s3:DeleteObject, and s3:ListBucket on the bucket. Use that user's access key ID and secret.

Endpoint: (leave blank — AWS default)
Region:   your bucket's region, e.g. us-east-1
Bucket:   your-backup-bucket

Step 3 — Connect it to OffsiteDB

Paste the Railway connection string, add Amazon S3 as your destination with the bucket and keys from Step 2, and choose a schedule (hourly to daily). OffsiteDB tests the connection, then runs pg_dump, gzips and seals the artifact with AES-256-GCM, and ships it to your bucket. Railway runs vanilla Postgres, so a read-only role on your schemas captures everything.

Step 4 — Know it restores (the part everyone skips)

Every snapshot is restore-drilled: OffsiteDB restores it into a throwaway Postgres cluster and counts the rows before marking it sealed. When you need it back, every artifact is a standard custom-format dump:

gunzip -c railway-db_2026-06-09.dump.gz \
  | pg_restore -d "$NEW_DATABASE_URL" --clean --if-exists

You also get a monthly Restore Drill Report with tested restore times — the document you forward when someone asks “are your backups tested?”

Back up Railway nowHow the encryption works

Before your next migration

Scheduled snapshots cover the slow disasters; deploys are the fast ones. One step in CI seals a tagged, restore-drilled checkpoint seconds before each migration runs — so a bad ALTER TABLE costs you a revert, not a day of data. Here's how that Friday goes with and without one.

FAQ

Does this work with Railway's free tier?
Yes. OffsiteDB connects with any standard Railway connection string regardless of tier. Railway Postgres runs Postgres 16, which is fully supported.
What permissions does the backup need on Railway?
A read-only role is enough — OffsiteDB only ever runs pg_dump and never needs write access. Railway runs vanilla Postgres, so a read-only role on your schemas captures everything.
Where exactly does my data end up?
In your own Amazon S3 bucket, encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it leaves the backup worker. OffsiteDB never holds the only copy — if you ever leave, your backups are standard pg_dump archives you can restore without us.
Can I just run pg_dump in a cron job instead?
You can — but a cron job doesn't prove the dump restores, alert you when it silently stops, or hand you a tested-restore report for a security review. OffsiteDB restore-drills every snapshot into a real Postgres cluster, which is the part that matters when you actually need it.

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