Backing up Postgres database rows before deleting them

by David Winterbottom on Thursday, 19 March 2015

by David Winterbottom
on Thursday, 19 March 2015

Hmmm, this delete statement is taking longer than I thought it would…

If you ever have to manually run a SQL delete statement in psql, you can back-up the rows you’re about to delete:

\copy ( select * from $table where id in ( ... ) ) to '/tmp/backup.csv'

and, if you’ve got your filter clause wrong (we’ve all done it), restore them with:

\copy $table from '/tmp/backup.csv'

Moderately useful.

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