Improving the performance of physical backup/recovery

Physical backups are quite different from logical ones, and this difference also extends to the options available to make them faster.

In both cases, it is possible to use multiple parallel processes, although for quite different reasons. Physical backups are mostly constrained by network and storage bandwidth, meaning that the benefit of parallelism is limited, although not marginally. Usually, there is little benefit in using more than four parallel processes, and you can expect to reduce backup time to 40–60% of what it is with a single thread. And, in any case, the more threads you use, the more it will impact the current system.

Incremental backup and restore are currently available only for physical backups. Although, in theory, it is possible to implement incremental behavior for logical backup/restore, in practice, this feature does not exist yet. Perhaps this is because physical backups are by nature faster...