Local Copies

Some database dump and restore flows can be facilitated by making local copies so that they can be quickly restored later (as opposed to a full restore with pg_restore). This can be accomplished with the pgclone copy command.

The pgclone copy command will copy the current database to a target database name using CREATE DATABASE <source> TEMPLATE <target>. By default, it uses the same database name that pgclone restore --reversible uses when creating the restore point of the current database.

In other words, you can do the following to create a copy of the database locally:

python manage.py pgclone copy

And then you can restore it with the following:

python manage.py pgclone restore :current

Tip

By default, pgclone restore will delete the special :current database unless --reversible is supplied. Use a custom copy name as shown below to avoid this.

To create named local copies, pass in a key that begins with :. For example:

python manage.py pgclone copy :my_backup

You can later restore this backup with:

python manage.py pgclone restore :my_backup

Danger

Calling pgclone copy will take out an exclusive access lock on the default database when copying it, preventing all activity until the copy is done. Use with caution, especially when running this in a production environment.