Backup and Restore

Part of the PostgreSQL course

The nightly job has been writing a file to disk for eight months and nobody has ever opened it. That is not a backup, that is a hopeful file. A backup only becomes a backup the first time you restore it and see your data come back, which is why this lesson has you drop a database on purpose and bring it back from a dump before it tells you anything else.

Postgres ships with the tools already. pg_dump reads a running database and writes out a portable copy. pg_restore reads that copy back in. Everything else in this lesson is a variation on those two commands. ...