How to take Incremental Backup of Postgres Database

haider_imran
Participant III

As backup and restoration is key process of the system, so taking full backup won't be the best practice for a live product.

Is there any possibility if we could take incremental backups of Postgres Database, any script or any build in feature that could help in achieving this?

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Hi Imran,

By trying to answer the same question, I found this collection of links useful:

http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/45870/how-to-do-incremental-backup-every-hour-in-postgres

"There are no commands to do incremental or differential logical backups. pg_dump can't take an incremental or differential. The only way to do that is via log archiving."

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/continuous-archiving.html

"At all times, PostgreSQL maintains a write ahead log (WAL) in the pg_xlog/ subdirectory of the cluster's data directory. The log records every change made to the database's data files. This log exists primarily for crash-safety purposes: if the system crashes, the database can be restored to consistency by "replaying" the log entries made since the last checkpoint. However, the existence of the log makes it possible to use a third strategy for backing up databases: we can combine a file-system-level backup with backup of the WAL files. If recovery is needed, we restore the file system backup and then replay from the backed-up WAL files to bring the system to a current state."

https://github.com/heroku/WAL-E

"WAL-E is a program designed to perform continuous archiving of PostgreSQL WAL files and base backups."

Hi,

I tried this but i have to main concerns first on every change of postgresql.conf file on restarting the server the file reset to its old configuration. Second on archive_command im trying this query which should copy a WAL file to mnt/server/archivedir but it doesn't take place maybe setting configuration from customers is also not having effect

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