science
Developer Tools
Intermediate
Supabase Backup Visualizer
Inspect a Supabase or PostgreSQL backup file as browsable tables — right in your browser, with zero upload. Parses COPY blocks, handles NULLs, renders a clean data grid.
- Category
- Developer Tools
- Complexity
- Intermediate
- Published
- Apr 05, 2026
- Developed By
- Abdullah Tarar
- Technologies
- supabasepostgresqlbackupsqldatabasedevtools
About this Experiment
Ever needed to peek inside a database backup without spinning up a database? The Supabase Backup Visualizer opens a .backup, .sql, or .txt PostgreSQL dump directly in the browser and turns it into browsable tables.
Features
- COPY-block parser — detects every
COPY table (columns) FROM stdin;block in the dump, extracting table names, column lists, and tab-separated row data. - Table picker — a dropdown lists every discovered table with its row count (e.g.
public.messages (1,204 rows)). - Clean data grid — sticky column headers, row hover highlighting, and smooth scrolling in both directions.
- Faithful to Postgres —
\Nvalues render as proper null cells, and all cell content is safely escaped. - Zero upload — the file is read locally with the FileReader API. Your data never leaves your machine — critical when a backup contains production user data.
The Experiment
A test of how much "database tooling" can live in a single dependency-free HTML file. The answer: enough to verify a backup, check a table's contents, or recover a value — without installing anything.