Bash script to backup all postgresql databases on a server, run with cron once a day or 5 times a day, whatever. Just updated it so it ignores your postgres db, and also bzips the backups and adds a symlink to a latest directory. Sweet.

pg_backup_all.sh

#!/bin/bash
# Location to place backups.
backup_dir="/var/backups/databases/"
nightly_dir="/var/backups/databases/latest/"
#String to append to the name of the backup files
backup_date=`date +%d-%m-%Y`
#Numbers of days you want to keep copie of your databases
number_of_days=15
databases=`psql -l -t | cut -d'|' -f1 | sed -e 's/ //g' -e '/^$/d'`
for i in $databases; do  if [ "$i" != "postgres" ] && [ "$i" != "template0" ] && [ "$i" != "template1" ] && [ "$i" != "template_postgis" ]; then    
    echo Dumping $i to $backup_dir$i\_$backup_date.sql    
    pg_dump $i > $backup_dir$i\_$backup_date.sql
    bzip2 $backup_dir$i\_$backup_date.sql
    ln -fs $backup_dir$i\_$backup_date.sql.bz2 $nightly_dir$i-nightly.sql.bz2
  fi
done
find $backup_dir -type f -prune -mtime +$number_of_days -exec rm -f {} \;

Brilliant, Thank You.
I have over 20 databases inside our PG Installation, and more are added from time to time.
So the psql -l is great, as it will run through the list.

If I run a pgdump manually, it will ask for the password for the postgres user before creating the dump file.
I imagine the same will be true if I run this script.

Is there a line of code we can add to feed the password in for each iteration of the loop ?
Is it worth putting a "wait" command inside the loop too ? just say so each DB has 1 minute to complete ?
I don't want the system trying to backup all DBs at once (or does it wait for the previous iteration's dump file to be created before proceeding anyway ?)

Thanks for your help - Great Post and Great Script !

Kev.

Actually you can use something like that PGPASSWORD=SOMESTRONGPASSWORD pgdump *PARAMS.....*

Not best practice but work

@benzhou2014 you are trying to unpack the symbolic link file, symbolic link is not a normal file, you need to use the real path of the file
to unpack the nightly item use this command :
bunzip2 "$(realpath your_filename-nightly.sql.bz2)"

That is it