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Back up Railway MySQL to DigitalOcean Spaces

Set up automatic, scheduled MySQL backups from Railway into your own DigitalOcean Spaces bucket — with retention, optional encryption and failure alerts — without writing a script or maintaining a cron server.

Why back up off-platform?

Railway offers volume backups on paid plans, but they live inside Railway. An off-platform copy protects you from account lockouts, billing issues and accidental deletes.

If your stack is on DigitalOcean, Spaces keeps billing in one place. Still, prefer a different region from your database.

Step 1 — Find your Railway database credentials

Open your database service in the Railway dashboard → Variables. Use the public DATABASE_PUBLIC_URL / MYSQL_PUBLIC_URL (host, port, user, password, database). Railway exposes a TCP proxy host like xyz.proxy.rlwy.net with a non-standard port.

Then allow the Dumpling worker's static IP address 2.28.121.200 to connect. Enable SSL if your server supports it. For extra safety, create a read-only user; the exact GRANT statements are in the docs.

Step 2 — Create a DigitalOcean Spaces bucket and access key

  1. Spaces → Create a Space (private).
  2. API → Spaces Keys → Generate New Key.
  3. Endpoint is https://<region>.digitaloceanspaces.com.

In Dumpling, the endpoint is https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com and the region is nyc3. Spaces is $5/month for 250 GB including 1 TB egress.

Step 3 — Create the backup job

  1. Sign in (free, no card) and add the database from step 1. Dumpling tests the connection and reports the version and size immediately.
  2. Add the DigitalOcean Spaces bucket from step 2. Dumpling writes and deletes a tiny test object to confirm the key works.
  3. Create a job: pick a schedule (daily at 02:00 UTC is a good default), how many backups to keep, and optionally a passphrase to encrypt files client-side-decryptably.

The first backup starts right away. From then on, Dumpling runs mysqldump on schedule and streams the output straight into Spaces. Every run shows the object key, size, duration and log.

Restoring

Download the object from DigitalOcean Spaces and run:

mysql -e "CREATE DATABASE restored_db"
gunzip < 2026-09-10T02-00-01Z.sql.gz | mysql restored_db

Encrypted files (.enc) decrypt with openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -pbkdf2; see the restore docs.

Prefer to do it yourself?

It is a few lines of shell — the hard part is the machine to run it, retention, and knowing when it silently stops working:

# DIY alternative: a cron job on a server you maintain
0 2 * * * mysqldump --single-transaction -h HOST -u USER -p... DB | gzip \
  | aws s3 cp - s3://BUCKET/backups/$(date -u +%FT%TZ).sql.gz --endpoint-url https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com
# ...plus retention, alerting, and a machine to run it on.

Dumpling exists so you do not have to babysit that cron job. The free plan covers one database with daily backups forever.

Back up Railway MySQL to Spaces in 3 minutes

No agent. No card. Your bucket.

Start free →

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