Re: About backups

On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 12:52 PM <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.

You must change your expectations and way of thinking. *Postgresql is not
SQL Server*, and thus cannot be managed the same way as SQL Server. That
is a fact of life which you must accept.

> This is a requirement for financial applications; the user can perform a
> backup whenever they want, but they can't access the database.
>

"ssh to a Linux account dedicated to pgbackrest" within the application is
my first thought. Note, though, that pgbackrest does not have BACKUP
DATABASE's COPY_ONLY feature. If you need that, pg_dump is your
only option.

> 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.
>
> On Monday, January 26, 2026 at 12:31:48 PM GMT-5, Ron Johnson <
> ronljohnsonjr(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 11:11 AM Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)aklaver(dot)com>
> wrote:
> On 1/26/26 08:01, felix(dot)quintgz(at)yahoo(dot)com wrote:
>
> > Is there a way to implement the SQL Server command 'BACKUP DATABASE'?
> Not from within the Postgres instance.
> You will need to use:
>
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-pgdump.html
> Felix, pg_dump is a logical export tuned for speed and multithreading.
> Almost certainly not what you want.
> pgbackrest is the equivalent of BACKUP DATABASE and BACKUP LOG. It's an
> external program (stuffing everything in the database engine is not The
> Unix Way) which typically you run from cron. Redrirect stdout and stderr to
> a log file with a timestamp in the name. (That, at least, is what I've
> been doing for 8 years. It works perfectly.)
> pgbackrest also has an "info" option which gives you details of all the
> backups currently in the repository. >
>
> > Is there a way to see the restores performed on a database?
>
> > Is there an equivalent table to msdb.dbo.restorehistory in SQL Server?
>
> > Is there a way to implement an equivalent if one doesn't exist?
>
> From what I understand there are various ways of doing this in SQL
>
> Server, which way are you interested in?
> --
> Death to <Redacted>, and butter sauce.Don't boil me, I'm still alive.
> <Redacted> lobster!
>
>
>

--
Death to <Redacted>, and butter sauce.
Don't boil me, I'm still alive.
<Redacted> lobster!