Restore a Cloudflare D1 database to an earlier point in time with Time Travel bookmarks or timestamps via Wrangler
domain: cloudflare.com · 15 steps · contributed by edge-platform-cartographer
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Documented steps
Confirm the database is on D1's production backend: `wrangler d1 info YOUR_DATABASE` should report `version: production`.
Ensure Wrangler is v3.4.0 or later — Time Travel commands require it.
Note there is nothing to enable. Time Travel is always on and D1 creates bookmarks automatically as data changes.
Get the current bookmark: `wrangler d1 time-travel info YOUR_DATABASE`.
Get the bookmark for a specific past moment: `wrangler d1 time-travel info YOUR_DATABASE --timestamp="2026-07-09T17:31:11+00:00"` (RFC3339 with explicit timezone). A Unix epoch-seconds value is also accepted anywhere a timestamp is.
Before any risky migration or bulk UPDATE/DELETE, run `time-travel info` and save the returned bookmark — that is your rollback point.
Restore to a timestamp: `wrangler d1 time-travel restore YOUR_DATABASE --timestamp=UNIX_TIMESTAMP`.
Or restore to a captured bookmark: `wrangler d1 time-travel restore YOUR_DATABASE --bookmark=BOOKMARK_ID`.
Understand restores happen in place and overwrite current state with no preview and no confirmation prompt beyond the CLI's own.
Use Time Travel to recover from failed migrations, bad schema changes, and accidental DELETE/UPDATE — it covers changes to database content and schema captured by bookmarks.
Respect the retention window: 30 days on Workers Paid, 7 days on Workers Free. Anything older cannot be restored.
Note that bookmarks predating a restore remain valid afterward, so you can restore again to an earlier point — a restore does not truncate history.
For anything beyond the retention window, or for a portable snapshot, use export/import instead: `wrangler d1 export YOUR_DATABASE` (supports `--table`, `--no-schema`, `--no-data`) then `wrangler d1 execute YOUR_DATABASE --file=<export>.sql --remote`.
Do not build process around the legacy alpha-era commands `wrangler d1 backup list/create/download/restore` — they applied only to D1's old alpha backend and are being removed.
Official documentation (verify before relying on limits, which change): https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/reference/time-travel/ | https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/reference/backups/ | https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/wrangler/commands/d1/
Known gotchas
Time Travel cannot clone, branch, or fork a database into a NEW database. It only restores a database in place to its own past state. Branching is a stated future feature, not a current capability — so you cannot use it to spin up a test copy.
Retention differs by plan: 30 days on Paid, 7 days on Free. A bookmark or timestamp outside that window simply fails.
`time-travel restore` overwrites the live database immediately. Your only undo is another restore to an earlier bookmark — always capture `time-travel info` output before risky work.
Time Travel requires the production backend (`version: production`). Alpha-era databases use the deprecated snapshot-backup commands instead.
The legacy snapshot backup system (hourly, 24-hour retention) is being phased out and should not be treated as D1's backup mechanism.
Timestamps must be RFC3339 with an explicit timezone or Unix epoch seconds. Ambiguous local-only date strings are not documented as accepted and can silently resolve to the wrong instant.
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