Data integrity is one of the most important pillars for a database system. If your database goes down, backups are how you stay safe and recover in case of disaster.Backups should be taken often, and recovery needs to stay fast. With backups being such a vital part of keeping your data safe, you should know how they work.The types of Postgres backupsThere are three different ways to back up a Postgres database: Logical backups (pg_dump), file system backups, and continuous archiving.Logical backupspg_dump is a purely logical backup that exports a consistent snapshot of the database, and is the simplest way to back up a Postgres database. At its core, pg_dump reads the current state of the database and writes the data to a given output.pg_dump can create dumps in either plain text as SQL statements (with SQL queries such as COPY or INSERT), or custom pg_dump formats designed for use with pg_restore.Regardless of the format used, the data pg_dump outputs is instructions on how to rebuild the data in the database.-- An abbreviated snippet of output from pg_dump in plain format
CREATE TABLE public.customers (
id bigint NOT NULL,
name text NOT NULL,
email text NOT NULL,
