Restore a deleted BigQuery table from snapshot

I accidentally deleted a BigQuery database in a project I was working on and panicked because there wasn't an obvious "undo" option.

Luckily as I learned from this StackOverflow post, it's totally possible to restore a deleted table.

The way to do it is by copying a snapshot of the table from before it was deleted, and referencing the snapshot time with a unix timestamp.

Supposing we removed a table accidentally at the time I'm writing this - March 25, 2026 at 10.15am ET.

bq rm dataset_name.important_table

We first need to get the unix timestamp for a time when the table still existed. We'll look up the timestamp for 10.00am, which is 1774447200.

We need to multiply this by 1000 since BigQuery uses timestamps in milliseconds, not seconds.

Then run a copy command for the table at the given time:

bq cp dataset_name.important_table@774447200000 dataset_name.my_restored_table                         

This will create a copy of the table as it was, under the new table name specified after the command.