To back up all databases, you may be told you need to use the pg_dumpall utility. The following are four good reasons why you shouldn't do that:
- If you use pg_dumpall the only output produced will be in a script file. Script files can't benefit from all the features of archive files, such as parallel and selective restore of pg_restore. By making your backup in this way, you will immediately deprive yourself of flexibility and versatility at restore time.
- The pg_dumpall utility produces dumps of each database one after another. This means that pg_dumpall is slower than running multiple pg_dump tasks in parallel, one against each database.
- The dumps of individual databases are not consistent to a particular point in time. As ...