Regular backups and the ability to restore them is a critical piece of database system administration. At ObjectRocket, daily backups with 2 week retention are always included and enabled by default on all of our database products. Our PostgreSQL offering adds an additional bonus which is WAL archiving and the ability to restore to any time within our retention window.

This is generally called Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) and I’ll walk you through how it works on our service.

No Fuss Backups
The first major component is the backup process. It’s fully automated and you don’t have to do anything. Included in the cost of all instances is daily backups and we retain two weeks worth of backups at all times. You can view your backup times and the status of previous in our dashboard or via the UI.

Multiple Restore Options
When you hit a scenario and you’d like to restore a backup, we offer a number of options. You can restore:

to the most recent WAL update we’ve stored;
to a specific base backup;
to a specific point in time.
In all cases, your data is restored to a new PostgreSQL instance and at this time, the instance storage must be greater than or equal to the storage on the original instance. This is sometimes called a database fork, but the main idea is that you restore your data to a new and separate database instance, so both the old and new instances stay active until you remove one.

One final note is that restores are currently only exposed via our API . If you’re comfortable with the API, great. Otherwise, our support team would be happy to help you through the process. We plan on adding restores to the UI in the very near future.

#features #postgresql