alt Hacker NewsShould one of the first things you do with a database not be to have a backup strategy? I understand that HA would be a "nice to have" when first starting out, but surly if you have a production db, a backup and restore plan should be on a survival guide? Neither appear to be mentioned here.
What do you all use for your pg backups? Is Barman ( https://pgbarman.org/) still the way many do it? (I haven't deployed a new pg instance for a while, but thinking about it for a new project).
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FWIW, we use: https://pgbackrest.org/
Offers point-in-time recovery which is an improvement over a custom solution we used to have which gave us nightly backups.
We have it backing up to Backblaze B2 (S3 like). Was relatively easy to setup and no problems really.
There’s no need to get all complicated and fancy or introduce more dependencies. For most people, a cron job calling pg_dump_all piped to zstd and copying the output to s3/ftp/whatever is plenty good enough.
Obviously past a certain point carting around full backups becomes time/dollar prohibitive, but this can take you very far.
An atomic volume snapshot should work for any database that's durable on power failure. Ideally preceded by a checkpoint, to minimize recovery time. Atomicity of the snapshot mechanism is essential to prevent data corruption using this approach.
We used EBS snapshots on AWS for multi-TB MongoDB to get incremental backups that are fast to create and fast to restore (with some performance degradation after restore).
It doesn't support point-in-time recovery, but since it's fast you can create frequent snapshots (e.g. hourly). I'd consider adding this as a secondary backup strategy, even if you use a higher-level postgres-specific backup tool.
If you already run k8s, why not just use cnpg?
Backups are mandatory for any serious deployment. But it's more devops and the guide is more about SQL layer.
This guide is only satisfactory if the database is managed, otherwise there are a whole bunch of things going on.
pgdump / pgrestore, using native binary format
I might get flak for saying this but if you aren't a postgres expert already: just use RDS or a similar cloud DB. The amount of money you're saving by hosting and managing your own postgres instance is absolute peanuts compared to having battle-tested infrastructure for HA, backup and restores, point-in-time recovery, read replicas, etc.