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Disaster Recovery Use Cases

The full process may look like this (a typical, rough, and simplified example):

  • A typical production setup runs two pgrwl StatefulSets in the cluster: one in receive mode for continuous WAL streaming, and another in backup mode for scheduled base backups.

  • In receive mode, pgrwl continuously streams WAL files, applies optional compression and encryption, uploads them to remote storage (such as S3 or SFTP), and enforces retention policies - for example, keeping WAL files for four days.

  • In backup mode, it performs a full base backup of your PostgreSQL cluster on a configured schedule - for instance, once every three days - using streaming basebackup, with optional compression and encryption. The resulting backup is also uploaded to the configured remote storage, and subject to retention policies for cleanup. The built-in cron scheduler enables fully automated backups without requiring external orchestration.

  • During recovery, the same receive StatefulSet can be reconfigured to run in serve mode, exposing previously archived WALs via HTTP to support Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) through restore_command.

  • With this setup, you're able to restore your cluster - in the event of a crash - to any second within the past three days, using the most recent base backup and available WAL segments.