Bulletproof PostgreSQL Disaster Recovery: Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) with WAL-G and S3
How to set up automated continuous WAL streaming and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) for PostgreSQL with WAL-G, recovering from accidental drops down to the exact second.
Relying solely on nightly pg_dump scripts for database backups is a recipe for disaster. If your production database corrupts at 4:30 PM, you lose an entire day's worth of financial transactions and customer records. Furthermore, pg_dump takes exclusive locks on large databases and cannot restore state to a specific second before a rogue DROP TABLE query was executed.
Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) with WAL-G streams Write-Ahead Logs continuously to encrypted S3 storage, enabling instant restoration to any millisecond in history.
Configuring PostgreSQL for Continuous WAL Archiving
# postgresql.conf
wal_level = replica
archive_mode = on
archive_command = 'wal-g wal-push %p'
archive_timeout = 60
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) in PostgreSQL?
PITR allows you to restore a database to the exact second before a failure or accidental data deletion by replaying continuous Write-Ahead Logs (WAL) over a base backup.
Why use WAL-G instead of WAL-E?
WAL-G is written in Go and performs parallel multi-threaded compression and S3 uploads, making backup and restore operations up to 10x faster.
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