Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to

Taking snapshots (Advanced)

Filesystem snapshots can provide a better-integrity guarantee for PostgreSQL backups, as files on a snapshot do not change during the backup. In Linux systems, the Linux Volume Manager (LVM) provides this capability. On BSD or specially altered Linux systems, ZFS is also available. On expensive SAN systems, this is often a built-in function. Due to its availability, we will cover LVM in this recipe.

Getting ready

Let's assume we have a 500 GB raw block device provided as /dev/sdb. This can be from an internal RAID or SAN management's LUN storage, or even just an internal disk. The following commands will make the /db path available to initialize as a new database:

$> pvcreate /dev/sdb
$> vgcreate db_group /dev/sdb
$> ...