Backup and restore

What backups do today, which defaults apply by plan, and how restore works in Craftifact.

Availability and defaults

Backups are available for paid instances. They are disabled for demo subscriptions.

Current defaults by tier:

Starter: scheduled every 24 hours, retained for 7 days
Pro: scheduled every hour, retained for 30 days
Team: scheduled every hour, retained for 30 days

Scheduled backups begin after an initial 6 hour warm-up period. Manual backups are available immediately.

Manual backups

Manual backups are useful before risky changes such as large imports or instance recreation.

Current behavior:

one stored manual backup per instance at a time
creating a new manual backup replaces the previous stored manual backup
manual backups expire after 7 days

Restore paths

There are two practical restore flows.

Restore into a fresh instance from the Control Plane

Use Restore from backup when creating a new instance. The new instance is provisioned first, then the restore starts automatically.

This path also carries over the stored config snapshot and OIDC snapshot from the backup.

Restore into an existing ready instance

Use the Backup tab on an existing instance and choose Restore for a completed backup. The target instance must already be active and ready.

Restore limits

Only completed backups can be restored.
Backups pending archive deletion cannot be restored.
Expired backups cannot be restored.
Restore is limited to instances in the same account.
Demo instances cannot be restore targets.

Rationale: why restore is instance-scoped

Backups are handled as instance-level snapshots, not as repository-by-repository migration jobs. That keeps restore behavior predictable for config, identity settings, and stored data together.

Deleting an instance

Deleting an instance does not force immediate backup deletion by default.