Maintenance, Optimization, and Performance Tuning - PostGIS - page 556

How it works...
As you can see, backing up your database is easy in PostgreSQL. Unfortunately,
backupsaremeaninglessifnotperformedonaregularschedule.Ifthedatabaseis
lostorcorrupted,anyworkdonesincethelastbackupisalsolost.Itisencouraged
that backups be done at intervals that minimize the amount of work lost. The
ideal interval will depend on the frequency of changes done to the database. The
pg_dump utility can be scheduled to run at regular intervals by adding a job to
theoperatingsystem'staskscheduler,withinstructionsavailableinthePostgreSQL
wiki at http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Automated_Backup_on_Windows and ht-
tp://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Automated_Backup_on_Linux .
The pg_dump utility is not adequate for all situations. If you have a database un-
dergoing constant changes or one that is larger than a few tens of gigabytes, you
willneedabackupmechanismfarmorerobustthanthatdiscussedinthisrecipe.In-
formationregardingtheserobustmechanismscanbefoundinthePostgreSQLdoc-
umentation at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/backup.html .
The following are several third-party backup tools available for establishing robust
and advanced backup schemes:
• Barman,which is available at http://www.pgbarman.org
• pg-rman,which is available at http://code.google.com/p/pg-rman