February 2020
Intermediate to advanced
734 pages
38h 13m
English
pgBackRest has a somewhat unconventional feature that allows it to restore into an existing PGDATA directory. Most backup and restore utilities steadfastly refuse to operate within a live PostgreSQL installation, but pgBackRest sees this as an opportunity for efficiency.
Imagine for instance we dropped the pgbench_accounts table from our test database and that's the only action we've taken since the last backup. It would be silly to restore the entire database, which could be hundreds of GB or even TB in size. Why not just restore only the files that have changed since the backup occurred?
pgBackRest calls this type of a restore a delta, and we can invoke such a restore with this variant of the restore command:
pgbackrest ...
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