This recipe describes how to set up a hot physical backup with a continuous archiving mechanism. The purpose of continuous archiving is to allow us to recover to any point in time after the completion of the backup.
Manually performing each step of this procedure is a great way to gain a clear understanding of PostgreSQL's backup and restore infrastructure. However, to reduce the chances of human errors, it is good practice to avoid reliance on complex activities that must be performed by a human operator.
Procedures such as taking a hot physical backup or restoring it up to a given point in time can be performed using specialized third-party tools such as the following:
- Barman: http://www.pgbarman.org/
- OmniPITR: https://github.com/omniti-labs/omnipitr
- PgBackRest: http://www.pgbackrest.org/
- PgHoard: https://github.com/ohmu/pghoard
- WAL-E: https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e
Being the creators and developers of Barman, our preference goes with this tool. However...