We're not able to grant temporary access to services on inactive accounts, including for data export. The path to regain access is to subscribe to a paid plan at your workspace billing page, which will bring your services back online so you can run pg_dump yourself. We do require a bank-issued credit or debit card for subscriptions, as prepaid cards are not supported.

Hey, as mentioned above Railway doesn't grant temporary access to services on inactive accounts. You can, if you haven't already, downgrade to the free plan at https://railway.com/workspace/plans and redeploy your database afterwards, which would grant you access to export it.

Thanks for the guidance. I've downgraded to the free plan and tried to redeploy, but I'm getting this error:

"This service requires a volume to be mounted at /var/lib/postgresql/data. Please attach a volume to the service and try again."

I checked the Settings tab for this Postgres service (Source, Networking, Scale, Deploy, Feature-flags, Danger) and there's no Volumes section at all - not even an unattached/empty one.

Before I try attaching or creating a volume myself, I want to make sure I don't accidentally initialize a new empty database over my real data. Can you confirm:

1. Does my original data volume for this Postgres service still exist on your end?
2. If so, can you help me reattach the existing volume (not create a new one) so I don't lose my data?

Service ID: ece97e0d-4d67-4bbb-afe9-2ca40c35f0d2

Project ID: 1f5662c0-3ac4-4292-a8fb-d9ee3fac9373

I just need to get pg_dump access to export my data, then I'll be migrating off Railway. Appreciate your help getting this specific issue resolved.

There is no volume attached to your Postgres service in this project, and no volume exists in the project at all. Without a volume, Postgres data lives only in the container's ephemeral storage, which is discarded on every redeploy, so the data is not recoverable. For future databases, attaching a volume ensures data persists across redeploys.

Meaning that if I paid for a subscription, I still wouldn't be able to recover my data?

That's correct. Since no volume was attached, the data existed only in ephemeral container storage, which has already been discarded. Subscribing would bring the service back online, but the database would start empty.