Urgent: Lost Postgres Data After Region Change (us-west1 to us-west2)
sasha
HOBBYOP

6 months ago

Hello Railway team,

I recently discovered that all the data in my PostgreSQL database connected to a Strapi project is gone. The only tables I see now are the default Strapi tables — all of my custom content types and entries are missing.

After investigating, I noticed that my Postgres service is now running in the us-west2 region, but originally it was created in us-west1. I did not initiate any region change or redeployment that would cause this. The switch seems to have happened automatically about 4 weeks ago.

I also noticed that a new Postgres service and volume were created, and my original database seems to have been deleted. Unfortunately, backups were not enabled at the time, and I had no reason to expect my data would be wiped without warning.

This has caused serious data loss for my production project. Could you please check:

  • If the original database or volume in us-west1 is still recoverable in any way?

  • If such region migrations happen automatically, and why I wasn’t notified?

Any help recovering the old data would be greatly appreciated.

Project: sklomontag_strapi
Environment: production
Old region: us-west1
Current region: us-west2
Approximate time of change: ~4 weeks ago

Thanks in advance for your support!

Solved

2 Replies

jake
EMPLOYEE

6 months ago

Hi, it appears that this occured before the migration to metal. The attached graph represents the deployments (green = CLOUD, yellow = METAL)

It appears that, on the 2nd, something occurred which wiped your database without any redeploy from our side. You will note that, after migrating to metal (yellow), the data is of equal size because we validate integrity

Attachments


Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway 6 months ago


jake

Hi, it appears that this occured before the migration to metal. The attached graph represents the deployments (green = CLOUD, yellow = METAL)It appears that, on the 2nd, something occurred which wiped your database without any redeploy from our side. You will note that, after migrating to metal (yellow), the data is of equal size because we validate integrity

sasha
HOBBYOP

6 months ago

On June 2, my production Postgres database was wiped — before the Cloud to Metal migration — and I hadn’t triggered any redeploy at that time. I’d appreciate it if you could check for any internal logs or alerts around that date that might explain what reinitialized the data directory, and let me know if there’s any snapshot or hidden volume from just before the wipe that could be restored. Also, I’d be grateful for any advice on how to enable alerts or safeguards to prevent unexpected data loss like this in the future.


Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway 6 months ago


Status changed to Solved sasha 6 months ago


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