pg_dumpbinary dumps a PostgreSQL database to a binary format. The resulting dump must be restored using pg_restorebinary, which is provided.
pg_dumpbinary 2.13 was released today, it fixes a restore issue with dropped columns in the dump.
A full list of changes and acknowledgments can be found here
pg_dumpbinary is useful when:
You have bytea that can not be exported by pg_dump because the total size of the escape/hex output exceeds 1Gb.
You have custom type that stores \0 internally in bytea but data are exported by pg_dump as char/varchar/text. In this case pg_dump truncates all data after the first '\0', resulting in data loss.
Other cases where a binary output format is useful.
In these kinds of cases pg_dumpbinary helps by dumping the PostgreSQL database in a binary format. In all other cases the pg_dump/pg_restore commands distributed with PostgreSQL are preferred.
See the documentation for a more complete description of available features.
Links & Credits
pg_dumpbinary is an Open Source project from LzLabs GmbH. Contributions and ideas are welcome. Send your ideas, features requests, or patches using GitHub's tools.