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+
+## Dumps and Backups
+
+There are a few different database 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
+