"Your project is paused" — your data is still there

The first thing to know, because the wording implies otherwise: paused is not deleted. Your tables, rows and files are sitting exactly where you left them. The project has been put to sleep, and waking it is a button.

Why it happened

Free Supabase projects pause after roughly a week without any activity. If you built something, published it, and nobody visited for a few days, that counts as inactive. The app then can't reach its database, so it shows errors or empty screens, and it looks exactly like catastrophic data loss from the outside.

Restoring it

1. Open your project at supabase.com. A banner will offer to restore it.
2. Click restore and wait. It usually takes a few minutes, longer for bigger databases.
3. Check your live site once it's up. Nothing in your app needs changing; it reconnects on its own.

One caveat worth knowing: projects left paused for a very long time (Supabase's docs say around 90 days) move into a state where restoring is harder and may need support's help. If yours has been down for months, open a support request rather than assuming it's gone.

Stopping the repeat

• Give it a heartbeat. Any regular traffic counts, so a free uptime monitor pinging your live site every few minutes both keeps you informed and keeps the project awake.
• Export a copy now. Whatever else you do, take one export while the data is in front of you and keep it somewhere that isn't the same account. Our backup guide covers doing this by hand in a few minutes.
• Upgrade if it's real. If actual people depend on the app, paid projects don't pause. That's the honest answer, not an upsell: at that point the monthly cost is smaller than one outage.