Physically recover heroku postgresql database

Question

Heroku makes clear in its documentation and in its blog that it stores postgres database physical backups (that's binary copies of the database cluster files) in S3 using its software called wal-e.

Does somebody know if there is a way for the final user to access them?

Notice that I'm talking about physical backup, not the logical one provided by PGBackups plugin. This issue is related with a database in the free plan, without rollbacks, forks nor follows.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

I wrote and write most of WAL-E on Heroku's behalf. There is no access to the archives because it is operating system and architecture bit-depth dependent. On the "Free" and "Hobby" tiers the archives contain a mix of data from multiple tenants, which is relevant to why fork/follow are not supported.