Database Backups and Disaster Recovery in PostgreSQL: Your Questions, Answered

Database backups and disaster recovery are crucial for protecting PostgreSQL databases from loss or corruption. Physical backups capture the database's state at a specific point in time, while logical backups export data into a human-readable format. To manage physical backups, tools like pg_basebackup and pgBackRest can be used, with pgBackRest offering improvements such as multi-threaded operations and support for incremental backups. Logical backups are useful for testing databases or migrations, but recovering from them is slow. Replicas can be used to improve availability, allowing the replica to take over in case of a failure. Timescale, a managed PostgreSQL platform, takes care of backup management, including full and incremental backups, EBS snapshots, and rapid recovery from compute failures. It also offers high-availability replicas and handles PostgreSQL upgrades automatically, with options for PITR (Point-in-Time Recovery) available soon.