Important note: Firebase private backups have changed since this blog post. Please see the updated details here.
We’ve built a new feature for Firebase that is now ready for an expanded beta. Private backups is an advanced feature for customers on our Bonfire plan or above that backs up your Firebase data every night and uploads it to Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3 buckets.
On a daily basis, we will back up your Firebase data and security rules and then upload them to a timestamped folder in your cloud bucket. This folder will contain a .json file with the Firebase data as well as a security_rules.txt file with the security rules data. We can also encrypt backups using PGP encryption before uploading them to the cloud.
Main Use Cases
Customers have been requesting this feature for a variety of use cases.
Offline analysis
Private backups provides offline access to Firebase data so you can crawl and analyze your data without affecting the realtime performance of their your customers’ connections to Firebase.
Historical record keeping
Since Firebase data is realtime, it is useful to have historical snapshots of the database. You can retroactively analyze their data to look for trends and make investigations based on past data points.
Ingestion into Analytics Products
Private Backups provides a perfect pipeline into cloud analytics products such as Google’s BigQuery. Cloud Analytics products often prefer to ingest data through Cloud Storage buckets rather than directly from the application.
Restores of corrupted or lost data
With private backups, you can restore your data yourself in the event of data corruption or loss, increasing the reliability of and control over your application. Note that for large Firebases it is still much more efficient to contact us to restore your data from our own system backups rather than through the .json files of private backups.
How to sign up
The Firebase Private Backups Beta is currently available to Bonfire level and higher customers.
If you are interested in this feature, please contact support and we will email you back with instructions on how to setup your cloud bucket to receive the scheduled backups.