This recipe is all about thinking ahead and planning. If you're reading this recipe before you take a backup, well done!
The key thing to understand is that you should plan your recovery, not your backup. The type of backup you take influences the type of recovery that is possible, so you must give some thought to what you are trying to achieve beforehand.
If you want to plan your recovery, then you need to consider the different types of failures that can occur. What type of recovery do you wish to perform?
You need to consider the following main aspects:
Full or partial database?
Everything or just object definitions only?
Point-in-Time Recovery
Restore performance
We need to look at the characteristics of the utilities to understand what our backup and recovery options are. It's often beneficial to have multiple types of backup to cover the different types of failure possible.
Your main backup options are the following:
Logical backup, using
pg_dumpPhysical backup, which is a...