Now that you have seen how to import and export data in the PostgreSQL world, it is time to focus your attention on performing basic backups. The backbone of a classical, text-based backup is a program called pg_dump
.
The
pg_dump
is a command-line tool, easy to use, and is capable of extracting a database in a plain text format. Here is how the most simplistic backup of them all works:
$ pg_dump test > /tmp/dump.sql
The dump.sql
file will contain a text representation of the database. If you happen to have data in your database, you will see that this data has been exported via COPY
.
Note, pg_dump
will return data as text. So, all on-board tools of your operating system are at your disposal. Here is how a dump can be compressed easily:
$ pg_dump test | gzip -c > /tmp/dump.sql.gz