a month ago
Hello Railway team,
I need help with a possible SQLite database recovery.
Project: impartial-hope
Service: worker
Timeline:
• June 7, 2026 — my Telegram bot successfully sent a broadcast to 453 users.
• June 9, 2026 — a new deployment was triggered from GitHub. Only bot.py was modified.
• After the deployment, the SQLite database was reset and now contains only 15 users.
Additional information:
• Database file: users.db
• No Railway Volume was attached
• The old deployment still appears in history as "Removed" and has a Redeploy button
• Current deployment contains users.db with only 15 records
I understand that Railway ephemeral storage is normally not persisted.
However, before giving up, I would like to know:
- Is there any possibility to access deployment artifacts from the removed deployment?
- Are old container layers or images still available internally?
- Does Railway keep any deployment snapshots, backups, or recovery mechanisms that support can check?
- Can the deployment from June 7–9 be inspected for the previous users.db file?
Any confirmation would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
6 Replies
a month ago
No. There isn’t any way to recover or inspect lost data in ephemeral environments.
Maybe this could be done for a fee? To upgrade the project’s internal infrastructure? We have a bot and users in it, but we can’t send them a newsletter.
Railway was keeping these people on board anyway. I need some way to communicate directly with the internal department.
a month ago
There’s a reason volumes exist.
a month ago
Really sorry — this data is almost certainly gone. Here's the honest answer to each of your questions:
Deployment artifacts from removed deployment — No. Railway ephemeral storage is wiped when a deployment is removed. The container and its files are gone.
Old container layers/images — Railway does not expose old container layers to users and does not retain them for recovery purposes.
Deployment snapshots/backups — Railway has no automatic backup mechanism for ephemeral storage. Only Railway Volumes get persisted across deployments.
Inspecting June 7–9 deployment for users.db — Not possible. The file lived inside the container filesystem, not on a volume.
Your only real option:
Try clicking Redeploy on the old "Removed" deployment in your history. This rebuilds the container from the old image — but it will likely contain the users.db that was baked into that build, not the one that accumulated 453 users at runtime.
To prevent this in future:
Attach a Railway Volume to your service and store users.db on it:
Railway dashboard → your service → Volumes → Add Volume
Mount it to the path where users.db lives (e.g. /app/data)
Move users.db there
That way data survives every redeployment permanently.