PostgreSQL Peek at Backup/Selective Restores

If you'd like to take a look at the content of the backups made via the on-demand or scheduled strategy without impacting your main deployment, you can use the In-Place Restore/Peek at Backup feature.

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Peek at Backup creates a new standalone server with the backup contents that you can connect to and examine the data. Standard pricing rules apply for this newly created deployment.

To use the Peek at Backup functionality, please follow these steps:

Step 1: Visit the Overview page of the deployment, click on the Backup & Restore menu option and choose Peek at Backup:

Step 2: Select the backup from the Backup List that will be used to create the new deployment. If a comment was added during the on-demand backup creation process, it will show up here:

Once you've selected the backup, click on the "Peek" button to start the Peek job.

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Partial Restore

Peek at Backup is especially helpful if you would like to do a partial restore (for example, restore a table that you accidentally deleted). In this case, you would Peek at a specific backup to create a new deployment, connect to the database and then use pg_dump to create a dump of the table which later can be reloaded on the master of your main deployment. Please note that these operations need to be exercised with caution by someone knowledgeable about existing schema and data.

You can also check out this Stack Overflow Q&A to learn more about the exact commands to use.