Recovering Firestore Data Fast with PITR and Fuego

Santi Bivacqua — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 23:07:05 +0000

The Hidden Cost of Not Having PITR: How to Recover from Firestore Disasters with Fuego

A few months ago, I faced a developer’s nightmare.
It was late in the day, I was cleaning up some old Firestore collections in production, and with one accidental click, I deleted far more than I intended. Entire sets of user feedback records were gone in seconds.

If you’ve ever worked with Firestore, you know the sinking feeling: Firestore doesn’t have a native “undo” button in its console. Without backups or a recovery strategy, that data is just… gone.

Thankfully, I had Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) enabled for my Firestore project - and I had Fuego installed.

What is Point-in-Time Recovery in Firestore?

Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) is a feature that allows you to restore your Firestore data to any second within the last 7 days. It’s essentially a rolling backup system managed by Google Cloud.

How it works in Firestore:

PITR keeps a continuous log of document changes for the last 7 days.
You can choose a timestamp and restore the entire database or specific collections/documents to that state.
Restored data is placed into a separate Firestore instance (or namespace), so you can review and selectively merge it back.

Limitations to keep in mind:

PITR is not free — it comes with additional storage costs for historical versions.
You must have PITR enabled in advance; you can’t use it retroactively.
Data older than 7 days is permanently unrecoverable (With PITR not enabled, you still have a one-hour time window.).
It doesn’t restore indexes or security rules — only documents and collections.

Why Fuego Makes PITR Actually Usable

Google Cloud’s native PITR recovery process is… let’s say, not the most user-friendly. You need to run gcloud CLI commands, deal with export/import jobs, and navigate JSON responses.

With Fuego, I didn’t have to touch the CLI at all. I just:

Selected my project.
Opened the PITR Restore tool.
Picked a timestamp right before the deletion happened.
Chose the specific collection (feedback) I wanted to recover.
Hit Restore — and watched my data come back.

Fuego’s PITR interface turns what could be a half-day of commands and checks into a couple of clicks.

Step-by-Step: Recovering from a Firestore Disaster with Fuego

Let’s walk through the exact steps I took that day.

1. Open the PITR tool in Fuego

From the left sidebar, select your Firestore project and open the Point-in-Time Recovery section.

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2. Choose the Recovery Time

Fuego lets you use a visual date/time picker to jump to any second in the last 7 days.
I selected the moment just before my accidental deletion.

3. Select What to Restore

You can restore:

specific collection
Or even just certain documents

For my case, I picked the feedback collection to avoid overwriting unrelated data.

4. Start the Restore

Click Restore, and Fuego handles the background process. Once completed, the restored data appears in a temporary namespace so you can validate it before merging.

5. Merge Back to Production

After confirming everything was intact, I merged the restored documents back into the production namespace — no data loss, no guesswork.

Lessons Learned

That day taught me two big lessons:

Always enable PITR for production Firestore projects. The cost is negligible compared to the risk of losing critical data.
Have the right tools ready. Google’s native recovery path works, but Fuego makes it fast, visual, and much less stressful.

If you’re building on Firestore and haven’t enabled PITR yet, do it today. And if you want recovery to be something you can actually do under pressure — not just in theory — try Fuego.

Because in the real world, disasters happen. The only question is how quickly you can bounce back.

DEV Community: Santi Bivacqua