Exploring logical backups

PostgreSQL ships with all the required tools to perform a logical backup and restore. Many operating systems, including FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux, provide scripts and wrappers for the PostgreSQL backup and restore tools to ease the system administrator in scheduling backups and restores. Such scripts and wrappers will not be explained here. For more information, consider reading your operating system’s PostgreSQL package documentation.

There are three main applications involved in backup and restore operations– pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore. As you can imagine from their names, pg_dump and pg_dumpall are related to extracting (dumping) the content of a database, thus creating a backup, while pg_restore is their counterpart and allows you to restore an existing backup.

It is important to note that the tool version matters, and you should always use the tools that match the same PostgreSQL major version. While you can use...