Backing Up Your Scalingo for PostgreSQL® Addon

Starter and Business plans of Scalingo for PostgreSQL® include automated and managed backups so you don’t have to worry about them.

We use two kinds of mechanisms to create these automated backups: Point-in-Time Recovery backups and Periodic backups. Manual backups are also available for these plans.

Understanding Point-in-Time Recovery Backups

Point-in-time recovery (PiTR) allows you to ask for the restoration of your data at a specific date. We achieve this by making a full PiTR backup of the database weekly. Between two full PiTR backups, we keep track of the write-ahead logs (WAL). The WAL contains all the modification instructions. By replaying the WAL from a full PiTR backup to a specific date, we are able to rebuild the state of the database at that particular date.

You have nothing to do to be able to use the PiTR mechanism. Be aware that you can only use the PiTR on the period between now and now minus seven days.

Retention Policy for PiTR Backups

Plan	PiTR Backup Retained
Sandbox	N/A
Starter	1
Business	1

Understanding Periodic Backups

Periodic backups are done on a daily basis. They consist in dumping your database in an archive that we keep during a certain amount of time.

For Business plans, the backup is done on the secondary node to avoid any impact on your primary node.

Retention Policy for Periodic Backups

We keep a limited amount of backups depending on your database plan:

A daily backup is retained for the last 7 days, which means that we will keep a maximum of 7 daily backups (one for each of the last 7 days).
A weekly backup means that only one backup is saved over a 7 days period.
A monthly backup means that only one backup is saved over the course of a month.

Plan	Weekly Backups Retained	Monthly Backups Retained
Sandbox	N/A	N/A
Starter	4 weeks	0 month
Business	8 weeks	12 months

Configuring Periodic Backups

By default, Periodic backups are done around 1:00 AM Central European Time (CET or UTC+0100). This time can be modified.

Using the Database Dashboard

From your web browser, open your database dashboard
Click the Backups tab
Locate the Backup Settings block
Make sure the Periodic backups toggle is set to enabled
Chose the time and select the timezone
Click the Set button to validate

Using the Command Line

Make sure you have correctly setup the Scalingo command line tool
From the command line, configure the time of backup:
- By setting an hour:
```
scalingo --app my-app --addon postgresql backups-config --schedule-at 3
```
  In this example, we ask the platform to create the backups at ~03:00 CET.
- By setting an hour and a timezone:
```
scalingo --app my-app --addon postgresql backups-config --schedule-at "4:00 UTC"
```
  In this example, we ask the platform to create the backup at ~04:00 UTC.
The output should look like this:
```
-----> Periodic backups will be done daily at 6:00 CET
```

Downloading a Periodic Backup

Using the Database Dashboard

From your web browser, open your database dashboard
Click the Backups tab
Locate the Backups block
Locate the Periodic backup you are interested in
Click the corresponding Download button

Using the Command Line

From the command line, run the following command(s):

To download the latest backup available:

scalingo --app my-app --addon postgresql backups-download

The output should look like this:

-----> Selected the most recent successful backup
139.37 KiB / 139.37 KiB [----------------------------------] 100.00% ? p/s
===> 20231207000608_my_app_4553.tar.gz

The backup is downloaded in your current working directory.

To download a specific backup:

List the backups available for this database addon:

scalingo --app my-app --addon postgresql backups

The output should look like this:

+--------------------------+--------------------------------+--------+--------+
|            ID            |           CREATED AT           |  SIZE  | STATUS |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+--------+--------+
| 65710b0a99c3cd23d455edee | Thu, 07 Dec 2023 01:00:10 CET  | 143 kB | done   |
| 656fb98b99c3cd23d455d4e7 | Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:00:11 CET  | 143 kB | done   |
| 656e680a99c3cd23d455c1f0 | Tue, 05 Dec 2023 01:00:10 CET  | 143 kB | done   |
...

Locate the ID of the backup you want to download

Download the backup:

scalingo --app my-app --addon postgresql backups-download --backup <backup_ID>

The output should look like this:

79.10 KiB / 79.10 KiB [---------------------------------] 100.00% ? p/s
===> 20230305000044_my_app_4553.tar.gz

The backup is downloaded in your current working directory.

Understanding Manual Backups

Manual backups use the exact same mechanism as Periodic backups, except that they are not automated. As the name suggests, Manual backups are triggered manually, whenever you want.

Retention Policy for Manual Backups

We keep a limited amount of Manual backups depending on your database plan:

Plan	Backups Retained
Sandbox	N/A
Starter	10
Business	50

When a database is removed from an application, the retention policy remains untouched: backups are not instantly deleted.

Creating a Manual Backup

Using the Database Dashboard

From your web browser, open your database dashboard
Click the Backups tab
Locate the Backup Settings block
Click the Make Manual Backup button

Using the Command Line

Make sure you have correctly setup the Scalingo command line tool

Ask the platform to backup the database:

scalingo --app my-app --addon postgresql backups-create

After a while, the output should look like this:

-----> Backup successfully finished

Downloading a Manual Backup

Please refer to Downloading a Periodic Backup section, as the process is exactly the same.

Dumping the Database

There are different ways to dump (and restore) a PostgreSQL® database. We generally advise to either:

Process from a one-off container
Or conduct the operations from your workstation, by accessing the database in a secured manner

From a One-Off Container

This method has two main advantages:

It doesn’t require to make your database reachable over Internet
You won’t have to tweak your connection URI

Follow the procedure to access your PostgreSQL® database from a one-off container
Make sure to understand the connection URI

Dump the database:

pg_dump --clean --if-exists --format c --dbname "${SCALINGO_POSTGRESQL_URL}" --no-owner --no-privileges --no-comments --exclude-schema 'information_schema' --exclude-schema '^pg_*' --file dump.pgsql

From Your Workstation

Open a DB tunnel so you can access your database from your workstation
Adjust the connection URI:
```
export SCALINGO_DATABASE_URL="postgresql://<user>:<password>@127.0.0.1:<port>/<dbname>"
```
With user, password and dbname from your original connection URI and port depending on what you did (default is 10000)

Dump the database using the pg_dump command (you may have to install it):

pg_dump --clean --if-exists --format c --dbname "${SCALINGO_POSTGRESQL_URL}" --no-owner --no-privileges --no-comments --exclude-schema 'information_schema' --exclude-schema '^pg_*' --file dump.pgsql

Last update: 26 Mar 2024 Suggest edits