7 min read
Our Sunday full backup of a 2.4 TB cluster had stretched to nine hours and the object-storage bill looked like a second salary. PostgreSQL 17's native incremental backup cut the weeknight run to about 95 GB — but the first…
Database Topic Archive
Backups and Durability Articles
Backups, restores, PITR, archive gaps, and recovery drills for PostgreSQL.
8 min read
When a bad migration forced a real point-in-time recovery, our restore took nine and a half hours against a two-hour RTO — replaying 1.8 TB of WAL is single-threaded, and we had never once timed it. The drill routine, the…
7 min read
Expired object-store credentials made archive_command exit 1 at 02:11; by 07:40 pg_wal held 380 GB on a 500 GB volume. The failure was visible for hours in pg_stat_archiver — the view almost nobody graphs.
7 min read
mysqldump, XtraBackup, and the clone plugin map surprisingly well onto pg_dump, pg_basebackup, and pgBackRest. The concepts transfer; the tools, PITR mechanics, and failure modes do not.
6 min read
PITR lets you restore the database to any moment within your retention window. The feature is well-documented; the operational reality is messier.
5 min read
Most teams have backups. Most teams have never restored from one. The first time you test, you find out the backup was missing something.
5 min read
Logical and physical backups solve different problems. Most teams need both, but only have one. Here is the actual decision framework.
5 min read
WAL accumulates fast. The retention policy is a tradeoff between PITR window and storage cost. Here is how I think about it.
6 min read
Backups only matter if restore is rehearsed. The real work is choosing RPO/RTO, preserving WAL, testing restores, and knowing what data you can afford to lose.