Runbooks

Restore a deleted Firestore collection

• In the Google Cloud console, Go to Firestore -> Disaster Recovery -> View All Backups
• On the backup you want to restore from, click "Restore" and enter a name for the temporary DB (e.g. temp1)
• Wait for the restore to fully spin up the new DB (as of March 2026, it takes somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes).
• In the Google Cloud console, go to "Import/Export"
  • Choose "Export"
  • Select "Export one or more collection groups" and choose profiles
  • Select a destination bucket (digital-testimony-dev-exports is a good default on DEV)
  • Copy the path of the resulting bucket for the next step - it should look something like gs://<BUCKET_NAME>/<EXPORT_DATE> by default, e.g. gs://digital-testimony-dev-exports/2026-03-30T15:42:52_94352/
• From the CLI (you can apparently only import specific collection groups through the CLI according to the Firebase docs):
  • Run the following command: gcloud firestore import <EXPORT_PATH> --collection-ids="profiles" --database="(default)" --project=digital-testimony-dev, where EXPORT_PATH is the path from the previous step (e.g. gs://digital-testimony-dev-exports/2026-03-30T15:42:52_94352/ )
  • Full sample command: gcloud firestore import gs://digital-testimony-dev-exports/2026-03-30T15:42:52_94352/ --collection-ids="profiles" --database="(default)" --project=digital-testimony-dev
• Check the Firestore console to confirm that the import was successful
• Delete the Export unneeded files in (digital-testimony-dev-exports)
• Delete the new DB (temp1)