On 9/18/18 11:55 PM, Alessandro Baggi wrote:
I don't know why I considered pg_dump better then filesystem backup. At this moment I prefer pg_dump because in this mode I can restore data on different version of postgresql. With filesystem dump I can restore only for a specific version. Is right?
That's right. pg_dump is an essential component of PostgreSQL upgrades, and it *can* be used as part of your backup process. On the up side: using pg_dump makes it possible to get consistent backups without filesystem snapshots. On the down side: using pg_dump is very slow, and makes it impossible to get incremental backups. For small databases, neither of those are terrible, but for large databases pg_dump is pretty awful.
With snapshots, you can back up the database files directly. It's reasonably fast, and you can typically improve backup time with incremental backups. You'd only need to pg_dump when you wanted to upgrade.