backup As everything that contains valuable data, PostgreSQL databases should be backed up regularly. While the procedure is essentially simple, it is important to have a basic understanding of the underlying techniques and assumptions. There are two fundamentally different approaches to backing up PostgreSQL data: SQL dump File system level backup The idea behind the SQL-dump method is to generate a text file with SQL commands that, when fed back to the server, will recreate the database in the same state as it was at the time of the dump. PostgreSQL provides the utility program pg_dump for this purpose. The basic usage of this command is: pg_dump dbname > outfile As you see, pg_dump writes its results to the standard output. We will see below how this can be useful. pg_dump is a regular PostgreSQL client application (albeit a particularly clever one). This means that you can do this backup procedure from any remote host that has access to the database. But remember that pg_dump does not operate with special permissions. In particular, you must have read access to all tables that you want to back up, so in practice you almost always have to be a database superuser. To specify which database server pg_dump should contact, use the command line options -h host and -p port. The default host is the local host or whatever your PGHOST environment variable specifies. Similarly, the default port is indicated by the PGPORT environment variable or, failing that, by the compiled-in default. (Conveniently, the server will normally have the same compiled-in default.) As any other PostgreSQL client application, pg_dump will by default connect with the database user name that is equal to the current operating system user name. To override this, either specify the -U option or set the environment variable PGUSER. Remember that pg_dump connections are subject to the normal client authentication mechanisms (which are described in ). Dumps created by pg_dump are internally consistent, that is, updates to the database while pg_dump is running will not be in the dump. pg_dump does not block other operations on the database while it is working. (Exceptions are those operations that need to operate with an exclusive lock, such as VACUUM FULL.) When your database schema relies on OIDs (for instance as foreign keys) you must instruct pg_dump to dump the OIDs as well. To do this, use the -o command line option. Large objects are not dumped by default, either. See pg_dump's command reference page if you use large objects. The text files created by pg_dump are intended to be read in by the psql program. The general command form to restore a dump is psql dbname < infile where infile is what you used as outfile for the pg_dump command. The database dbname will not be created by this command, you must create it yourself from template0 before executing psql (e.g., with createdb -T template0 dbname). psql supports similar options to pg_dump for controlling the database server location and the user name. See its reference page for more information. If the objects in the original database were owned by different users, then the dump will instruct psql to connect as each affected user in turn and then create the relevant objects. This way the original ownership is preserved. This also means, however, that all these users must already exist, and furthermore that you must be allowed to connect as each of them. It might therefore be necessary to temporarily relax the client authentication settings. Once restored, it is wise to run ANALYZE on each database so the optimizer has useful statistics. You can also run vacuumdb -a -z to ANALYZE all databases. The ability of pg_dump and psql to write to or read from pipes makes it possible to dump a database directly from one server to another; for example: pg_dump -h host1 dbname | psql -h host2 dbname The dumps produced by pg_dump are relative to template0. This means that any languages, procedures, etc. added to template1 will also be dumped by pg_dump. As a result, when restoring, if you are using a customized template1, you must create the empty database from template0, as in the example above. Restore performance can be improved by increasing the configuration parameter sort_mem (see ). The above mechanism is cumbersome and inappropriate when backing up an entire database cluster. For this reason the pg_dumpall program is provided. pg_dumpall backs up each database in a given cluster, and also preserves cluster-wide data such as users and groups. The call sequence for pg_dumpall is simply pg_dumpall > outfile The resulting dump can be restored with psql: psql template1 < infile (Actually, you can specify any existing database name to start from, but if you are reloading in an empty cluster then template1 is the only available choice.) It is always necessary to have database superuser access when restoring a pg_dumpall dump, as that is required to restore the user and group information. Since PostgreSQL allows tables larger than the maximum file size on your system, it can be problematic to dump such a table to a file, since the resulting file will likely be larger than the maximum size allowed by your system. As pg_dump can write to the standard output, you can just use standard Unix tools to work around this possible problem. You can use your favorite compression program, for example gzip. pg_dump dbname | gzip > filename.gz Reload with createdb dbname gunzip -c filename.gz | psql dbname or cat filename.gz | gunzip | psql dbname The split command allows you to split the output into pieces that are acceptable in size to the underlying file system. For example, to make chunks of 1 megabyte: pg_dump dbname | split -b 1m - filename Reload with createdb dbname cat filename* | psql dbname If PostgreSQL was built on a system with the zlib compression library installed, the custom dump format will compress data as it writes it to the output file. For large databases, this will produce similar dump sizes to using gzip, but has the added advantage that the tables can be restored selectively. The following command dumps a database using the custom dump format: pg_dump -Fc dbname > filename See the pg_dump and pg_restore reference pages for details. pg_dump (and by implication pg_dumpall) has a few limitations which stem from the difficulty of reconstructing certain information from the system catalogs. Specifically, the order in which pg_dump writes the objects is not very sophisticated. This can lead to problems for example when functions are used as column default values. The only answer is to manually reorder the dump. If you created circular dependencies in your schema then you will have more work to do. For reasons of backward compatibility, pg_dump does not dump large objects by default.large objectbackup To dump large objects you must use either the custom or the TAR output format, and use the -b option in pg_dump. See the reference pages for details. The directory contrib/pg_dumplo of the PostgreSQL source tree also contains a program that can dump large objects. Please familiarize yourself with the pg_dump reference page. An alternative backup strategy is to directly copy the files that PostgreSQL uses to store the data in the database. In it is explained where these files are located, but you have probably found them already if you are interested in this method. You can use whatever method you prefer for doing usual file system backups, for example tar -cf backup.tar /usr/local/pgsql/data There are two restrictions, however, which make this method impractical, or at least inferior to the pg_dump method: The database server must be shut down in order to get a usable backup. Half-way measures such as disallowing all connections will not work as there is always some buffering going on. For this reason it is also not advisable to trust file systems that claim to support consistent snapshots. Information about stopping the server can be found in . Needless to say that you also need to shut down the server before restoring the data. If you have dug into the details of the file system layout of the data you may be tempted to try to back up or restore only certain individual tables or databases from their respective files or directories. This will not work because the information contained in these files contains only half the truth. The other half is in the commit log files pg_clog/*, which contain the commit status of all transactions. A table file is only usable with this information. Of course it is also impossible to restore only a table and the associated pg_clog data because that would render all other tables in the database cluster useless. An alternative file-system backup approach is to make a consistent snapshot of the data directory, if the file system supports that functionality. Such a snapshot will save the database files in a state where the database server was not properly shut down; therefore, when you start the database server on this backed up directory, it will think the server had crashed and replay the WAL log. This is not a problem, just be aware of it. Note that the file system backup will not necessarily be smaller than an SQL dump. On the contrary, it will most likely be larger. (pg_dump does not need to dump the contents of indexes for example, just the commands to recreate them.) upgrading version compatibility As a general rule, the internal data storage format is subject to change between major releases of PostgreSQL (where the number after the first dot changes). This does not apply to different minor releases under the same major release (where the number of the second dot changes); these always have compatible storage formats. For example, releases 7.0.1, 7.1.2, and 7.2 are not compatible, whereas 7.1.1 and 7.1.2 are. When you update between compatible versions, then you can simply reuse the data area in disk by the new executables. Otherwise you need to back up your data and restore it on the new server, using pg_dump. (There are checks in place that prevent you from doing the wrong thing, so no harm can be done by confusing these things.) The precise installation procedure is not subject of this section; these details are in . The least downtime can be achieved by installing the new server in a different directory and running both the old and the new servers in parallel, on different ports. Then you can use something like pg_dumpall -p 5432 | psql -d template1 -p 6543 to transfer your data. Or use an intermediate file if you want. Then you can shut down the old server and start the new server at the port the old one was running at. You should make sure that the database is not updated after you run pg_dumpall, otherwise you will obviously lose that data. See for information on how to prohibit access. In practice you probably want to test your client applications on the new setup before switching over. If you cannot or do not want to run two servers in parallel you can do the back up step before installing the new version, bring down the server, move the old version out of the way, install the new version, start the new server, restore the data. For example: pg_dumpall > backup pg_ctl stop mv /usr/local/pgsql /usr/local/pgsql.old cd ~/postgresql-&version; gmake install initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data psql template1 < backup See about ways to start and stop the server and other details. The installation instructions will advise you of strategic places to perform these steps. When you move the old installation out of the way it is no longer perfectly usable. Some parts of the installation contain information about where the other parts are located. This is usually not a big problem but if you plan on using two installations in parallel for a while you should assign them different installation directories at build time.