Most people admit that backups are essential, though they also devote a very small amount of time to thinking about the topic.

The first recipe is about understanding and controlling crash recovery. You need to understand what happens if the database server crashes so that you can understand when you might need to recover.

The next recipe is all about planning. That's really the best place to start before you go charging ahead to do backups.

The physical backup mechanisms here were initially written by me (Simon Riggs) for PostgreSQL in release 8.0 in 2004, and have been supported by me ever since then, now with increasing help from the community as its popularity grows. 2ndQuadrant has also been providing database recovery services since 2004, and regrettably many people have needed them as a result of missing or damaged backups.