rust backups notes

1 files changed, 30 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/rust/README.md b/rust/README.md
index 8c742cb1..a6873345 100644
--- a/rust/README.md
+++ b/rust/README.md
@@ -63,6 +63,36 @@ on a bare server, as root:
     cd /srv/fatcat/fatcat/rust
     cargo run
 
+### Dumps and Backups
+
+There are a few different databaase dump formats folks might want:
+
+- raw native database backups, for disaster recovery (would include
+  volatile/unsupported schema details, user API credentials, full history,
+  in-process edits, comments, etc)
+- a sanitized version of the above: roughly per-table dumps of the full state
+  of the database. Could use per-table SQL expressions with sub-queries to pull
+  in small tables ("partial transform") and export JSON for each table; would
+  be extra work to maintain, so not pursuing for now.
+- full history, full public schema exports, in a form that might be used to
+  mirror or enitrely fork the project. Propose supplying the full "changelog"
+  in API schema format, in a single file to capture all entity history, without
+  "hydrating" any inter-entity references. Rely on separate dumps of
+  non-entity, non-versioned tables (editors, abstracts, etc). Note that a
+  variant of this could use the public interface, in particular to do
+  incremental updates (though that wouldn't capture schema changes).
+- transformed exports of the current state of the database (aka, without
+  history). Useful for data analysis, search engines, etc. Propose supplying
+  just the Release table in a fully "hydrated" state to start. Unclear if
+  should be on a work or release basis; will go with release for now. Harder to
+  do using public interface because of the need for transaction locking.
+
+Backing up the entire database using `pg_dump`, with parallelism 1 (use more on
+larger machine with fast disks; try 4 or 8?), assuming the database name is
+'fatcat', and the current user has access:
+
+    pg_dump -j1 -Fd -f test-dump fatcat
+
 ### Special Tricks
 
 Regenerate API schemas (this will, as a side-effect, also run `cargo fmt` on