Development quote of the week
The second, and more serious, problem with the "pg_dump is not a backup tool" narrative is that it's invalidating. Without offering any specific fact or theory or argument, it asserts that if you think that pg_dump is a backup tool, you're foolish. You're so foolish, in fact, that the speaker need not justify the outlandish claim that pg_dump does not do what the documentation has clearly said that it does for more than two decades. If you haven't heard somebody else say it already, then allow me to be the first: you are not foolish for thinking that pg_dump can be used to back up your PostgreSQL instance. It totally can. It is often not the best approach, but sometimes it may be just perfect. The case mentioned above, where you want to have the contents of your database in text format that you can read with non-PostgreSQL tools, is just one example of where that may be so. Others exist, too.