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Enterprise applications

Native Ddta protection

Contributors jfsinmsp
PDFs

One of the major aspects of storage design is enabling protection for PostgreSQL volumes. Customers can protect their PostgreSQL databases either by using the dump approach or by using file system backups. This section explains the different approaches of backing up individual databases or the entire cluster.

There are three approaches to backing up PostgreSQL data:

  • SQL Server dump

  • File-system-level backup

  • Continuous archiving

The idea behind the SQL Server dump method is to generate a file with SQL Server commands that, when returned to the server, can re-create the database as it was at the time of the dump. PostgreSQL provides the utility programs pg_dump and pg_dump_all for creating individual and cluster-level backup. These dumps are logical and do not contain enough information to be used by WAL replay.

An alternative backup strategy is to use file-system-level backup, in which administrators directly copy the files that PostgreSQL uses to store the data in the database. This method is done in offline mode: the database or cluster must be shut down. Another alternative is to use pg_basebackup to run hot streaming backup of the PostgreSQL database.