Incremental Backup in PostgreSQL | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025

Video of a conference talk discussing the incremental backup feature which Robert developed for PostgreSQL 17. The talk will discuss how we determine what data has changed, and why the chosen approach was selected. It will then review in some detail how incremental backups can be taken and restored. Robert Haas has been involved in the PostgreSQL project since 2008, first as a patch reviewer and committer and later as a major developer. Prior to that, he was a PostgreSQL application developer for nearly ten years. Features he has worked on include incremental backup (16), backup compression, backup targets, and backup manifests (13-15), parallelism (9.4-11), the replacement of System V shared memory with anonymous shared memory (9.3), read and write scalability improvements (9.2), index-only scans (9.2), unlogged tables (9.1), and left join removal (9.0). He works at EnterpriseDB as VP, Chief Architect, Database Server. ► Video bookmarks: ⏩ 00:13 Introduction - Incremental Backup in PostgreSQL 17 ⏩ 00:45 Overview & Motivation ⏩ 02:45 Taking an Incremental Backup ⏩ 07:01 Knowing What Data Has Changed: Requirements ⏩ 10:15 The Write-Ahead Log to the Rescue ⏩ 13:09 Restoring an Incremental Backup ⏩ 16:19 Summary 📕 Everything you need to know about POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 can be found at: https://posetteconf.com ✅ Learn more: Watch more POSETTE talks: https://aka.ms/posette-playlist 📌 Let’s connect:   LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/posetteconf/ X – @PosetteConf, https://twitter.com/PosetteConf Mastodon – @posetteconf, https://mastodon.social/@posetteconf Bluesky – @posetteconf.com, https://bsky.app/profile/posetteconf.com __________________________________ #PosetteConf #PostgreSQL #Backup