How to Restore Deleted BigQuery Tables

Despite the complexity of data infrastructure, automation of tasks and expertise of a team, we can’t data engineer one thing: The fact that humans can and always will make mistakes.

As a data engineer one of the most significant (and terrifying) mistakes you can make is overwriting or deleting data from your organization’s data warehouse.

Luckily, if your organization uses Google Cloud to host its infrastructure, there are ways to address this costly and embarrassing mistake.

Although I’ll mention three methods to restore BigQuery data, my preference is to do so through the Python API.

To that end, at the conclusion of this story I’ll provide a short code snippet, derived from Google’s documentation, that automates the snapshot retrieval and data restoration process.

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