Mastering PostgreSQL 12 - Third Edition

Creating base backups

After teaching PostgreSQL how to archive those WAL files, it is time to create a first backup. The idea is to have a backup and replay WAL files based on that backup to reach any point in time.

To create an initial backup, we can turn to pg_basebackup, which is a command-line tool used to perform backups. Let's call pg_basebackup and see how it works:

pg_basebackup -D /some_target_dir          -h localhost          --checkpoint=fast          --wal-method=stream 

As we can see, we will use four parameters here:

• -D: Where do we want the base backup to live? PostgreSQL requires an empty directory. At the end of the backup, we will see a copy of the server's data directory (destination).
• -h: This indicates the IP address or the name of the master ...