Bulletproof PostgreSQL Disaster Recovery: Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) with WAL-G and S3

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