Maintaining functional backups of your data and work is probably the least appreciated, yet the most important thing you can do to improve your productivity (and stress levels). You may think that you don't need to have backups of your PostGIS database because you have the original data imported to the database, but do you remember all the work you did to develop the final product? How about the intermediary products? Even if you remember every step in the process, how much time will it take to create the intermediary and final products?
If any of these questions gives you pause, you need to create a backup for your data. Fortunately, PostgreSQL makes the backup process painless, or at least less painful than the alternatives.
In this recipe, we use PostgreSQL's pg_dump utility. The pg_dump utility ensures that the data being backed up is consistent, even if it is currently in use.