Backups

Postgres has two mechanisms for backups:

  • Physical backups are a byte for byte backup of the data on disk. These are included with Crunchy Bridge.
  • Logical backups contain the raw data as a set of SQL statements such as CREATE table and INSERTs. You can take a logical backup manually.

Read more about the difference between and logical and physical backups here.

Automated backups

Physical backups are included with Crunchy Bridge clusters automatically. By default, a new backup will be taken once a day. If you have a maintenance window set, the platform will aim to run the backup process during that window, and the process is throttled in order to maintain cluster performance throughout.

For each cluster, a PostgreSQL base backup is captured each day and kept current by streaming the WAL every 60 seconds or 16MB (whichever comes first). A backup can be restored as a fork to any minute in its history.

Backup retention

By default, Crunchy Bridge retains the last 10 days' worth of backups for each cluster at no additional charge. If you would like to change the number of backups the platform retains for a cluster, you can configure variable backup retention in the Backups tab. Choose the number of additional daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups you would like to be retained:

New backups are collected and retained as you have configured them for as long as your cluster is running. A cluster cannot be suspended while extended backup retention is configured. If you destroy a cluster, all backups will also be destroyed after 5 days.

Contact support if you'd like to discuss additional considerations with backups.

Accessing your backups

Information about the backups that Crunchy Bridge is currently storing for a cluster can be found under the Backups tab.

You can also view and copy credentials to access your backup files directly. This can be useful for retrieving and storing backups outside of Crunchy Bridge.

Crunchy Bridge uses pgBackRest to manage cluster backups. If you want to download and use the backups created for you by the platform, you will need to use pgBackRest to do so. For more details about downloading and working with your backup files, see Downloading backups and Restoring backups.

Forking from backup

You can create a new fork from any of the backups stored for your cluster by clicking the "Fork from Backup" button. This process will create a new cluster according to the options you specify, and the new cluster will be populated with the data from the backup.

Info

Remember, each fork will have its own unique connection string.

Starting a manual backup

If you'd like to trigger a manual backup, you can do so from the Backups tab or using the CLI or API.

Using the CLI or API for backups

Both the CLI and API have capabilities for managing backups and all the features described above.

Logical backups

Crunchy Bridge does not automatically capture logical backups, but you can capture your own logical backups at any time using pg_dump.