Stefan Fercot

Bio

I first started to work as a PostgreSQL Database and Linux System Administrator around 2010, working on a large number of servers in the Belgian health-care area, deploying software upgrades, handling database backups and keeping systems up-and-running. I've been passionate about database backups, disaster recovery and high-availability since then. I've also been a PostgreSQL consultant: training, support, customer consultancy and as much contribution to the PostgreSQL community as possible. Finally, I'm currently working as Database Backup Architect for EDB, mainly focused on pgBackRest contribution and support.

Talk Description: Point-in-time Recovery, target 2022

Your pg_dump takes forever? You want to save your data more frequently? Have you ever heard of Point-in-time recovery? In his talk, we'll introduce what is called Point-in-time Recovery (aka "live backup").
We'll see how to achieve it step-by-step if you want to do manually:

  • archive_command / pg_recievewal;
  • pg_basebackup;
  • exclusive backup;
  • non-exclusive backup;
  • restore.
PostgreSQL 12 brought a significant change in this area with the removal of the recovery configuration file. We'll see more precisely the impact of this change. We'll then mention some interesting backup (and restore) tools and give some key points to compare them (documentation, parallel execution, compression, incremental backups,...).