An ancient italian proverb says
Il backup è quella cosa che andava fatta prima.
A rough translation could be something like this: the backup is the thing that had to be done before.
The concept of backup is quite confusing. Some people wrongly believe that executing a local backup is sufficient to ensure the recover of the data.
In the real world a valid backup is present only if three conditions are true.
pgbackrest is an amazing tool that saves entire PostgreSQL clusters with ease.
In this post we’ll go trough the configuration of the backup using a remote backup server.
For the extensive documentation and detailed instructions please refer to the user guide.
operating system configuration For our example we’ll use two virtual machines on virtualbox with devuan 1.0 Jessie installed.
Each machine is configured in the same way.
1 cpu 1 GB ram Hard disk of 12 GB with single partition ext4 sshd up and running The machines have one bridged network adapter eth0.
After upgrading some clusters to PostgreSQL 9.4.4 I noticed an increase of the database backup. Because the databases are quite large I’m taking the advantage of the parallel export introduced with PostgreSQL 9.3.
The parallel dump uses the PostgreSQL’s snapshot export with multiple backends. The functionality requires the dump to be in directory format where a toc file is saved alongside with the compressed exports, one per each table saved by pg_dump.
