Use pg_dump and pgBackRest for Postgres backups

Cost

Open source. Both tools are free. The storage that holds the copies is paid.

How to do it

pg_dump ships with Postgres under the PostgreSQL licence. Postgres 18.6 is current, and version 18 is supported until November 2030. A dump restores into any newer version, so it is also your way out. pgBackRest reached 1.0 in April 2016 and is under MIT. Version 2.60.0 came out on 18 October 2026. It adds parallel, encrypted backups to S3, Azure or GCS, and replays WAL to any point in time. The targets come from Set recovery targets, and copies go off the machine as Back up off the machine says. Choose something else when you use a managed Postgres, and keep its built-in recovery plus your own nightly pg_dump.

Examples

Using these examples: they show one way to follow this rule. Keep the behaviour and the check, not the syntax. Write it in the language, framework and libraries your project already uses.

Shell example

pg_dump --format=custom --file="orders-$(date +%F).dump" "postgresql://backup@db.example.com/orders"
pg_restore --list "orders-$(date +%F).dump" > /dev/null

INI example

# /etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf
[global]
repo1-type=s3
repo1-s3-bucket=backups-example
repo1-s3-endpoint=s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com
repo1-s3-region=eu-north-1
repo1-cipher-type=aes-256-cbc
repo1-retention-full=4

[orders]
pg1-path=/var/lib/postgresql/18/main

How to check

The newest backup is younger than the recovery point objective. A restore into an empty server, run in the last 3 months, finished faster than the recovery time objective.

Sources

• pg_dump
• PostgreSQL versioning policy
• pgBackRest

Related rules

• Set recovery targets in Operations
• Back up off the machine in Operations