New Backup Tool | Scaling Postgres 423

Our first piece of content is PostgreSQL Backup Done Right.

Now, this is not actually a blog post.

There is a blog post we'll look at, but this is a new website that has been spun up called pghardstorage.org, and the actual tool is called pghardstorage.

It's an open-source PostgreSQL backup tool, and this is a project backed by CyberTech, and it says it is version 1.

So I haven't even heard of the previous versions.

It's an Apache 2 license and it supports PostgreSQL 15 and above.

And for a project I haven't heard of, it has the most comprehensive website for it I've ever seen, talking about all the capabilities and features and why it was done.

So that alone is impressive.

And here's basically how it works.

It's a tool that resides on another server.

You connect up to Postgres via replication slot that receives the wall stream.

It then does a chunk and dedupe and assigns a shot to it.

It encrypts it and then stores it in a repository.

So it does it via chunks to make restores easier.

And just the number of docs and examples is truly impressive for, again, something I haven't really heard of before.

And looking at the how it works, you basically create a dedicated role on your database and grant it pgReadAllData.

And it has a content address stored, so every backup is a full, essentially, and dedupe is free.

So here's a quick example.

They set up the connection and where you want it to write the files, the repo, essentially.

And this is just a command line tool to take a base back up and then to start reading from the wall stream.

So you would want to put this in some type of systemd service, for example.

And then if you need to do a restore, it's this third command.

So again, this is just a single static binary.

You don't install anything on your database.

And looking at some of the examples, they give an example of a Linux server and a Petroni cluster.