Snapshots and Restore in Orbit

Every Orbit project takes a nightly snapshot of two things that are otherwise impossible to get back once you delete them: your config store entries and your environment variables. Thirty nights are kept, on every plan including the free one, and you can restore any of them yourself in one confirmed action.

This guide covers exactly what a snapshot holds, what it does not hold, how to restore one, and how to undo a restore.

What a Snapshot Holds

Each nightly snapshot contains, for the project it belongs to:

Every config store entry: the key, the value, and whether the entry is injected into the page.
Every environment variable, both the project-level ones and the per-environment overrides, including their values, their target environment types and their branch scoping.

Values are encrypted at rest with the same key and the same cipher as your environment variables themselves, so a snapshot never makes a secret easier to reach than the variable it came from.

What a Snapshot Does Not Hold

This is the part worth reading before you rely on it.

Your git repository. It lives with your git provider and it is yours. Orbit does not copy it.
Blob store objects. Your blob storage is already durable and is not part of a snapshot.
Build artifacts. Successful builds are kept under your plan's deployment retention window, which is a separate setting on the project. Restoring a snapshot does not restore a build, and rolling back a deployment does not restore config or environment variables. See Rolling Back a Deployment.
Databases, logs, analytics or anything your application writes at runtime.

How Long Snapshots Are Kept

Thirty nights, on every plan. After that a snapshot is removed automatically.

There is one deliberate exception. The three most recent snapshots are always kept, even after they pass thirty nights. A project you have not touched for two months would otherwise have every snapshot expire on the same night and leave you with nothing to restore at exactly the moment you finally need one.

Restoring a Snapshot

Open your project in Orbit.
Open Settings, then Snapshots.
Find the night you want. Each row shows how many config entries and environment variables it holds, and when it will be removed.
Click Restore this snapshot.
Type the confirmation phrase exactly as shown. It names your project and the night you are restoring, for example restore my-blog 2026-08-30.
Click Restore now.

Restoring needs the Owner or Admin role on the account that owns the project. Anyone who can see the project can read its snapshot history.

What a Restore Actually Does

A restore puts your project back to the state of that night. That means it is not a merge:

entries and variables that existed then and are missing now are recreated, with their original values;
entries and variables whose values have changed since are set back;
entries and variables you added after that night are removed.

The screen tells you exactly what happened afterwards: how many were added, how many changed, and how many were removed, for the config store and for environment variables separately.

Undoing a Restore

Before a restore writes anything, Orbit takes a snapshot of the state it is about to overwrite. It appears in your list as a Before a restore row, and the confirmation screen names it when the restore finishes.

So if you restore the wrong night, restore that row and you are back where you started. Nothing about a restore is one-way.

After Restoring Environment Variables

A running deployment holds the environment variables it was built and started with. Restoring them changes what your next deployment will use, so redeploy if you need the restored values live. The project shows a banner when your configuration has changed since the last deployment.

Every variable a restore creates, changes or removes is recorded on the project's environment variable history, with who did it and when, exactly as a manual change is.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does the snapshot run? Nightly, at 04:00 UTC, as part of the same nightly pass that prunes old build artifacts.

Can I take one on demand? Not from the screen today. A restore always takes one first, so the state before any restore is always captured.

Does a snapshot cost anything? No. Snapshots are included on every plan, and the config store itself is free to read and write.

Will restoring reveal a secret I marked write-only? No. A restore puts the value back; it does not display it. A write-only variable stays write-only.