How to Backup and Restore PostgreSQL using the pgBackrest tool

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Stratos Matzouranis

The journey began in 2008 where I officially started working in the field of IT (IT). Starting the first semester of school I realized a special attraction towards databases and automation. I have been involved with databases such as Microsoft SQL Server / Oracle Database, data analysis and automations using the command line (CLI), Visual Basic for Applications and Python. Through years of experience I have developed these capabilities so that I can make my life easier. For me, the purpose of every IT guy and every office worker is to have the knowledge so that through tools he can work a little but produce a lot. Through this his website DataPlatform.gr I try to offer knowledge and propose solutions to everyday problems.

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Latest posts by Stratos Matzouranis (see all)

• How to Backup and Restore PostgreSQL using the pgBackrest tool - 28 August 2026
• How to Point in Time Restore a PostgreSQL database without using 3rd party tools - 24 August 2026
• How to Backup a PostgreSQL Database Without Using 3rd Party Tools - 18 August 2026

As we have seen in previous articles in older versions of PostgreSQL before version 17 there was no possibility for block level backup as a result we could not do differential and incremental backups and we had to take full backup every day. Also the management of backups and restore / recovery through WALs (archive logs) was complicated. These two problems can be solved by using a 3rd party tool of pgBackrest.

The installation steps

To install it on a Unix version Oracle Linux / Red Hat, run the following command:

sudo yum install pgbackrest --nogpgcheck -y

After the installation is complete, to see that it has been installed successfully, we can check the version with the following command:

pgbackrest version

Then we create the folders where the backups will be stored and give them the correct permissions:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/pgbackrest
sudo chmod 750 /var/lib/pgbackrest
sudo chown postgres:postgres /var/lib/pgbackrest

With the following command we find the path where PostgreSQL is installed, we will need it later:

sudo -u postgres psql -c "SHOW data_directory;"

Then we modify the configuration file, as follows: repo1-path the location where the backups will be stored, as repo1-process-max is the parallelism we allow him, as repo1-retention-full is how many backups we want to keep, below we define the name of the backupset, for our example I have said postdb11 and below as pg1-path we put the path where PostgreSQL is installed:

sudo vi /etc/pgbackrest.conf

[global]
repo1-path=/var/lib/pgbackrest
repo1-retention-full=2
process-max=2

[postdb11]
pg1-path=/var/lib/pgsql/11/data

We need to give this file the correct permissions:

sudo chown postgres:postgres /etc/pgbackrest.conf
sudo chmod 640 /etc/pgbackrest.conf

Then we go to the PostgreSQL configuration file where we will need to set some parameters:

sudo vi /var/lib/pgsql/11/data/postgresql.conf

Let's go down to the category. # – Archiving and add the following:

# - Archiving -

archive_mode = on               # enables archiving; off, on, or always

archive_command = 'pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 archive-push %p'

As well as the wal_level:

wal_level = replica

Then we will need to restart the PostgresSQL service:

sudo systemctl restart postgresql-11

How backups are performed via pgBackrest

To now perform a backup, we must first create the backup set with the name we gave in the configuration file, in our case with the name postdb11:

sudo -u postgres pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 stanza-create

To take a full backup, run the following command:

sudo -u postgres pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 --type=full backup

If we want to click on it and take a differential backup, we run the following:

sudo -u postgres pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 --type=diff backup

Now to see what backups have been performed and we have, we run the command:

sudo -u postgres pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 info

Adding a process to a scheduler (cronjob)

We can now simply add two jobs to automate the backup process with a full backup every Sunday at 11:00 PM and differential backups on the other days.

To give this we need to add the following to crontab:

sudo -u postgres crontab -e

# Full Backup 
0 23 * * 0 pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 --type=full backup >> /var/log/pgbackrest/backup-full.log 2>&1

# Differential Backup 
0 23 * * 1-6 pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 --type=diff backup >> /var/log/pgbackrest/backup-diff.log 2>&1

How to restore the database using pgBackrest

First we stop the service:

sudo systemctl stop postgresql-11

We delete the database files for the example:

sudo -u postgres rm -rf /var/lib/pgsql/11/data/*

To start the restore, run the following command with the parameter target we can do Point In Time Restore:

sudo -u postgres pgbackrest --stanza=postdb11 restore --type=time --target="2026-07-25 23:30:00"

To see the restore log, run the following:

sudo tail -f /var/log/pgbackrest/postdb11-restore.log

To view the PostgreSQL log, run the following:

sudo journalctl -u postgresql-11.service -e --no-pager

Sources:

• PostgreSQL 18.4 Documentation