On Jul 29, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Rob Richardson wrote:
> Greetings again!
>
> A few days ago, I visited a customer's site to talk about
> administering
> our system, which is developed around a PostGres database. One of the
> topics was how to back up the database. I described the process of
> using PgAdmin to back up and restore a database, and I said a backup
> should be done every night. I was asked how to automate the
> procedure,
> and I couldn't answer. A database administrator said, "There's got to
> be a way. Otherwise, PostGres wouldn't have survived". I agree with
> him. The only answers I've found on the Internet involve creating a
> password-less account and using that to run pg_dump. What is the
> official best way to automatically back up a PostGres database?
There's no one best way.
A simple way is to use pg_dump or pg_dumpall, running on the same
machine
as the database connecting via a unix socket using ident authentication
to dump a consistent view of the database out to a file.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/backup.html discusses
several
other ways.
Cheers,
Steve