Point-in-time Recovery
When you make a change to a PostgreSQL database, the PostgreSQL server records your changes in the shared-buffer pool, the write-ahead log (WAL), and eventually, in the file that holds the table that you've changed. The WAL stores a complete record of every change that you make. PostgreSQL's point-in-time recovery mechanism (PITR) uses the modification history stored in the WAL files to roll-forward changes made since the most recent cluster backup. You can think of PITR as an incremental backup scheme. You start with a complete backup and then, periodically, archive the changes. To recover from a crash, you restore the complete backup and then apply the changes, in sequence, until you've recovered all of the data that ...
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