How to create a backup of a single table in a postgres database?

Is there a way to create a backup of a single table within a database using postgres? And how? Does this also work with the pg_dump command?

6 Answers

Use --table to tell pg_dump what table it has to backup:

pg_dump --host localhost --port 5432 --username postgres --format plain --verbose --file "<abstract_file_path>" --table public.tablename dbname 

If you are on Ubuntu,

1. Login to your postgres user sudo su postgres
2. pg_dump -d <database_name> -t <table_name> > file.sql

Make sure that you are executing the command where the postgres user have write permissions (Example: /tmp)

Edit

If you want to dump the .sql in another computer, you may need to consider skipping the owner information getting saved into the .sql file.

You can use pg_dump --no-owner -d <database_name> -t <table_name> > file.sql

pg_dump -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres -d mydb -t my_table > backup.sql

You can take the backup of a single table but I would suggest to take the backup of whole database and then restore whichever table you need. It is always good to have backup of whole database.

9 ways to use pg_dump

If you prefer a graphical user interface, you can use pgAdmin III (Linux/Windows/OS X). Simply right click on the table of your choice, then "backup". It will create a pg_dump command for you.

you can use this command

pg_dump --table=yourTable --data-only --column-inserts yourDataBase > file.sql 

you should change yourTable, yourDataBase to your case

As an addition to Frank Heiken's answer, if you wish to use INSERT statements instead of copy from stdin, then you should specify the --inserts flag

pg_dump --host localhost --port 5432 --username postgres --format plain --verbose --file "<abstract_file_path>" --table public.tablename --inserts dbname

Notice that I left out the --ignore-version flag, because it is deprecated.