## Disclaimer

Do **NOT** use the following backup methods on the Stolon Cluster:
  1. copying the data directory
  2. `pg_dump`
  3. `pg_dumpall`

The first one will lead to corrupted/inconsistent files.
The second and third ones put too much pressure on the cluster.
Basically, you will destroy it, in the following ways:
  - Load will increase, requests will timeout
  - RAM will increase, the daemon will be OOM (Out Of Memory) killed by Linux
  - Potentially, the WAL log will grow a lot


## A binary backup with `pg_basebackup`

The only acceptable solution is `pg_basebackup` with **some throttling configured**.
Later, if you want a SQL dump, you can inject this binary backup on an ephemeral database you spawned solely for this purpose on a non-production machine.

First, start by fetching from Consul the identifiers of the replication account.
Do not use the root account setup in Stolon, it will not work.

First setup a SSH tunnel on your machine that bind postgresql, eg:

```bash
ssh -L 5432:psql-proxy.service.2.cluster.deuxfleurs.fr:5432 ...
```

Then export your password in `PGPASSWORD` and launch the backup:

```bash
export PGPASSWORD=xxx

pg_basebackup \
  --host=127.0.0.1 \
  --username=replicator \
  --pgdata=/tmp/sql \
  --format=tar \
  --wal-method=none \
  --gzip \
  --compress=6 \
  --progress \
  --max-rate=2M
```

*Take a cup of coffe, it will take some times...*

## Importing the backup

## Dump SQL