Is there a way to backup all of the databases on a hyperscaler managed postgres server as of a certain time in order to maintain data consistency between the databases with either pg_dumpall, pg_dump or something else?
Background:
With the utilization of micro-services, an application may have many databases associated to it on a single hyperscaler managed postgres server. The hyperscalers do perform a functional snapshot backup; however, when a hyperscaler managed postgres server is accidentally deleted, the postgres backups are lost as well. These hyperscalers provide locks to prevent accidental deletes of a postgres server and mention that their support teams can be contacted to restore a deleted server, however, we still had a postgres server get deleted. We were able to recover by contacting the hyperscalers support team but would like to have a second way of backing up a hyperscaler managed postgres server.
I realize that the micro-services should be able to auto-recover to a data consistent point but the reality is that many of the micro-services have not been designed nor written to that requirement. I really do not want to get into the aspect of micro-service design and want to retain this to be a DBA backup question.
2
Answers
You can use pg_basebackup which most of the PostgreSQL DBA’s would end up using on a daily basis be it via scripts or manually. This creates the base backup of the database which can help in recovering in multiple situations. This takes an online backup of the database and hence is very useful when being used in production
you can review this for more details
pg_dumpall
will not take a consistent backup across all databases. Each database backup will be consistent, but the snapshots for the backups of the different databases will be taken at different times.If you need a consistent backup across several databases in a single cluster, use an online file system backup with
pg_basebackup
.