Re: About backups

Can I copy pg_dump directly into the container?

Or is there an installer just for the PostgreSQL utilities?

On Monday, January 26, 2026 at 01:04:17 PM GMT-5, Christophe Pettus <xof(at)thebuild(dot)com> wrote:

> On Jan 26, 2026, at 09:52, felix(dot)quintgz(at)yahoo(dot)com wrote:
>
> I'm having a problem with this. I'm repurposing an old application written in Visual Basic 6 that did allow backups through signed stored procedures.
> This is a requirement for financial applications; the user can perform a backup whenever they want, but they can't access the database.
> The new application is web-based, deployed in containers, and the database server container is not the same as the application's, so I can't use pg_dump in the application, or at least I don't know how to do it.

There is currently no supported way of backing up a PostgreSQL database via an SQL command.  You could, in theory, use the COPY command to dump each individual table, but that's probably not what you are looking for (since it would also require a fairly sophisticated restore process).

pg_dump can run in the application container, and connect to the database in the database container, just like the application does.  There's no requirement that pg_dump run on the database host.  That's probably the best direction in this case.