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pgBackRest to backup PostgreSQL

08.2019 / Category: / Tags: |

written by Granthana Biswas

pgBackRest is an open source backup tool for PostgreSQL which offers easy configuration and reliable backups. So if you want to protect your database and create backups easily, pgBackRest is a good solution to make that happen. In this blog, we are going to go through the basic steps of using pgBackRest for full and differential backup of PostgreSQL.

Some of the key features of pgBackRest are:

  1. Parallel backup & restore
  2. Local and remote operations
  3. Full, incremental & differential backups
  4. Backup rotation & archive expiration
  5. Backup integrity
  6. Page checksums
  7. Resume backups
  8. Streaming compression and checksums

To read about them more in detail, please visit pgbackrest.org.

Here, we are going to build pgBackRest from the source and install it on the host where a test DB cluster is running.

Installation

Installing from Debian / Ubuntu packages:

For manual installation, download the source on a build host. Please avoid building the source on a production server, as the tools required should not be installed on a production machine:

Download pgBackRest Version 2.14:

Install the dependencies and check for 64-bit integers:

Build pgbackrest package:

Copy from build host to DB host:

Install Perl packages:

pgBackRest config files & directories on DB test host:

Create repository for pgBackRest

Set the Repo path and PostgreSQL cluster directory in the pgbackrest file:

[demo]

pg1-path=/data/postgres/pgdata/data1

[global]

repo1-path=/var/lib/pgbackrest

Configure archiving on the PostgreSQL cluster:

Change the following parameters in postgresql.conf:

Create stanza as postgres user:

The stanza-create command must be run on the host where the repository is located to initialize the stanza. It is recommended that the check command be run after stanza-create to ensure archiving and backups are properly configured.

Use the info command to get information about the backup

Since we haven't made any backups yet, we will get the following result:

Backup:

Let's make the first backup. By default, it will be full even if we specify type as differential:

Now when we run the info command again:

Take a differential backup of the cluster

To see the changes, check info:

If you want to learn more about how to protect data, check out my blog on PostgreSQL TDE ("Transparent Data Encryption") .

Also if you want to make sure that your database performs well, check out our blog posts on PostgreSQL performance.


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