Backup and Restore

SampleDB stores all its information a PostgreSQL database, so to create a backup of SampleDB, you will need to create a backup of this database.

It is recommended that you stop the SampleDB container before creating backups and start it again afterwards.

While you yourself will need to decide when and how exactly you want to create backups, the following section shows examples of how backups can be created.

Please follow general system administration best practices.

The PostgreSQL database

One way of creating a backup of a PostgreSQL database is to create an SQL dump using the pg_dump tool:

docker exec sampledb-postgres pg_dump -U postgres postgres > backup.sql

The resulting backup.sql file can then be copied to another system.

To restore the PostgreSQL database from such an SQL dump, you should first remove the existing database:

docker stop sampledb-postgres
docker rm sampledb-postgres
rm -rf pgdata

You can then recreate the database container and restore the backup using the psql tool:

docker run \
    -d \
    -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password \
    -e PGDATA=/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata \
    -v `pwd`/pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata:rw \
    --restart=always \
    --name sampledb-postgres \
    postgres:15
docker exec -i sampledb-postgres psql -U postgres postgres < backup.sql

If you have set different options for the database container before, e.g. setting it in a specific network and giving it a fixed IP, you should also set these options here.

For more information on backing up a PostgreSQL database and restoring a backup, see the PostgreSQL documentation on Backup and Restore