Branch from a point in time
Neon's killer feature: create a branch at a past timestamp and inspect it without touching production.
neon branches create --project-id <id> \ --parent-timestamp "2026-07-04T02:00:00Z" --name incident-inspect
Point a client at the branch, verify the data is good, then either promote it or copy the damaged rows back.
Mind the history window
PITR only reaches as far back as your plan's history retention (hours on free, up to 30 days on paid). Corruption older than the window — the subtle kind that takes weeks to notice — needs an archived logical backup instead.
Restoring a dump into Neon
pg_restore --no-owner --no-privileges --jobs=4 \ --dbname "$NEON_URL" backup.dump
Use a fresh database or branch as the target so a partial restore can't half-overwrite production.
Whatever tool made your backup, the only way to know it works is to restore it. Firedrill does that automatically for every backup — or try a one-off free drill on a dump you already have.