Physical Backups:
– Copies of physical database files or binaries
– Two ways to perform physical backup:
(A)- PostgreSQL pg_basebackup or MySQL percona xtrabackup or Oracle rman
(B)- OS utilities – for eg. rsync
(C)- Hosting provider specific for eg. AWS RDS or EBS Volume Snapshots
Logical Backups:
– Copies of the data structures such as tables, stored procedures, triggers, indexes, sequences, users, etc.
– CSV or other data extracting tools
Some use one of the as the main method of backup and the other as a supplemental way to backup the databases.
Others use both methods.
Which one to use?
– Depends on the size of your data
– My recommendation is that for bigger sizes (100GB or more) prefer to use Physical DB backup methods because it’s faster to backup and much faster to restore