3 months ago
Hi Railway Support Team,
I am experiencing a critical data loss issue with my PostgreSQL service. I did not delete the service manually, but my database is now empty/inaccessible.
Looking at the logs, the issue started appearing today around 15:17 UTC (Dec 22, 2025). The logs repeatedly show a Collation Version Mismatch:
"The database was created using collation version 2.36, but the operating system provides version 2.41."
It seems the underlying infrastructure was updated, rendering my existing data unreadable by the new Postgres instance, causing the service to eventually fail and seemingly reset to an empty state (FATAL: database "railway" does not exist).
Could you please check if the previous volume/disk snapshot is recoverable? The data is critical and I cannot restore it from my end due to the version conflict.
Project Name/ID: [PON TU NOMBRE DE PROYECTO AQUÍ]
Service: PostgreSQL
Thanks, Dani
2 Replies
3 months ago
Collation version match you can solve it with this:
REINDEX DATABASE railway;
ALTER DATABASE railway REFRESH COLLATION VERSION;
But the data.. sounds bad. I hope railway have data snapshot for you to recover. For the future I would suggest to use S3 or R2 backups (there are free tiers) and you can set up the services here:
S3 AWS or Cloudflare R2:
https://railway.com/template/I4zGrH
Specific R2:
3 months ago
unless you've previously backed up your own data, railway won't have a backup for you