I decided it was probably time that I started backing up my PostgreSQL databases and ended up writing a quick script to do just that. I did have a look at pg_dumpall, but it appears to only write to stdout, meaning I couldn't have a file per database like I wanted.

#!/bin/bash

set -u
set -e

dumpdir=/var/backups/postgresql 

date=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
mkdir -p $dumpdir
find $dumpdir -name "*.sql" -mtime +10 -exec rm {} \; 
for database in $(su - postgres -c "psql -l -t" | cut -d'|' -f 1 | grep -v template0); 
do 
        su - postgres -c "pg_dump $database" > $dumpdir/$database-$date.sql; 
done

su - postgres -c "pg_dumpall -g" > $dumpdir/global-$date.sql

Just stick that in /etc/cron.daily/postgresql-backups and you should end up with 10 days worth of backups. I'm not sure if postgreSQL can have spaces in database names. I'm assuming it can't. The only other issue to deal with is not storing it on the same machine as the database server, let alone on the same physical hardware or even worse, the same partition.

Update: Corrected typo and added dumping global objects to the script.

Sorry to anyone that got spammed by my change to pyblosxom earlier today. I changed the base url, which changed the link of the entries. I should sort out having proper guids.