Backup Is Not Enough: A PostgreSQL Recovery Story

This experiment is designed to test and validate the pgrwl tool in real conditions: https://github.com/pgrwl/pgrwl Instead of synthetic examples, we simulate a real-world failure and verify that recovery actually works end-to-end. Let’s do something slightly uncomfortable. We're going to simulate a database crash and recovery. Think disk failure. Whole server gone. And then bring it back - byte for byte - as if nothing happened. Not "some" data. Not "close enough". Everything. The Myth of "Backups" Most people think: "I have a backup, so I'm safe." That's... half true. A base backup is just a snapshot - a frozen picture of your database at one moment. But databases don't sit still. Every insert, update, delete - all of that happens after your backup. So where does that data live? -> In WAL (Write-Ahead Log) The Real Rule If you remember one thing from this post, let it be this: Recovery = Base Backup + WAL Without WAL: your backup is outdated your data is incomplete your recovery is