A method and apparatus for a mechanism of disaster recovery and instance refresh in an event recordation system are described. A first request for events associated with a first topic is received. A first set of events associated with the first topic are retrieved from a primary event recordation system. Each event from the first set of events includes a first commit identifier indicating the order with which each event is stored in the primary event recordation system. For each event from the first set of events a first replay identifier is determined based on the first commit identifier and a first value of a low commit identifier. The first replay identifier is exposed to event consumers for identifying the event. In response to the first request each event from the first set of events is transmitted with the replay identifier.