How to create and list backups

This guide contains recommended steps and useful commands for creating and managing backups to ensure smooth restores:

• Save your current cluster credentials, as you’ll need them for restoring
• Create backups
• List backups to check the availability and status of your backups

Prerequisites

• A cluster with at least three nodes deployed
• Access to S3 storage
• Configured settings for S3 storage

Save your current cluster credentials

For security reasons, charm credentials are not stored inside backups. So, if you plan to restore to a backup at any point in the future, you will need the operator, replication, and rewind user passwords for your existing cluster.

You can retrieve them with:

juju run postgresql/leader get-password username=operator
juju run postgresql/leader get-password username=replication
juju run postgresql/leader get-password username=rewind

For more context about passwords during a restore, check How to restore a (foreign) backup | Manage cluster passwords.

Create backups

Once you have a three-node cluster with configurations set for S3 storage, check that Charmed PostgreSQL is active and idle with juju status.

Once Charmed PostgreSQL is active and idle, you can create your first backup with the create-backup command:

juju run postgresql/leader create-backup

Tip: To avoid unnecessary service downtime, always use non-primary units for the action create-backup. Keep in mind that:

• TLS enabled: disables the command from running on primary units.
• TLS not enabled: disables the command from running on non-primary units.

List backups

You can list your available, failed, and in progress backups by running the list-backups command:

juju run postgresql/leader list-backups

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