The concept of backup and restoration of data is a vital one to any database administrator. No system is immune from
hard drive crashes, careless users, or any number of potential catastrophes that can endanger data stored within PostgreSQL.
This section covers two general methods for backing up your data. The first approach uses the
pg_dump
application distributed with PostgreSQL to create a set of SQL instructions with which a
database can be fully restored. The second method consists of backing up the filesystem itself.
