For custom backups, there's some additional configuration required. You'll need to specify the following items in the data image definition file:

• path
• format
• initialDatabaseName

Tutorial (step-by-step)

Create a backup

Assuming there is a database called pagila running at prod-db.example.com on port 5432 and is accessible to the user admin, you can run the following pg_dump command:

pg_dump -h prod-db.example.com -U admin --create pagila --format=custom > ./postgres-backup-image/pagila.dump

Upload the backup

You will then need to upload the pagila.dump file to the fileshare setup by your administrator. This will be the value they have defined in the Admin Console configuration page.

Assuming that you have SSH access to the server containing the fileshare, you could use rsync to upload the file.

rsync -r ./postgres-backup-image <fileshare-server>:/backups/

Create a data image yaml file

Now that we've got a pagila.dump file produced by pg_dump we can create our data image definition YAML file with the following contents:

# ~/rgclone/postgres-backup-image/image.yaml
sourceType: backup
name: pagila
engine: postgresql
version: 14
backups:
- path: backups/postgres-backup-image/pagila.dump
  format: custom
initialDatabaseName: pagila
tags:
- production

This instructs Redgate Clone to create a data image called pagila on Postgres 14. It will locate the file at backups/postgres-backup-image/pagila.dump in the fileshare and restore that custom backup file using pg_restore, snapshot the state of the restored database and then produce the data image ready for consumption.

The data image will also have a production tag associated with it, so you later know that this data image represents a backup of production.

Create the image

Run:

rgclone create data-image --file=./image.yaml

This will create the data image from the backup defined in the image.yaml file we created.