Hot physical backup is an important capability for databases.
Physical backup allows us to get a completely consistent view of the changes to all databases at once. Physical backup also allows us to back up even while DDL changes are being executed on the database. Apart from resource constraints, there is no additional overhead or locking with this approach.
Physical backup procedures are slightly more complex than logical backup procedures. So, let's start with a simple procedure to produce a standalone backup.
The following steps assume that a number of environment variables have been set, which are as follows:
$PGDATA
is the path to the PostgreSQLdata
directory, ending with/
$BACKUPNAME
is the filename of a backup file, that is,mybackup.tar
All required PostgreSQL connection parameters have been set
Note
The initial procedure is step 1 onwards. If you are running subsequent backups, start from step 6.
The steps are as follows:
Create...