Instead of storing whole dd images, even if they’re just backups of small partitions, you can save space and bandwidth by piping dd into a compression utility like gzip. You can then unzip the files straight into sha1sum to get a checksum of what you just backed up.

Reliable, effective, and simple. If you don’t mind a blip in ldap service for a minute or two in the wee hours of the night, it works like a charm.

If your dump was performed with the “–clean” option, you can skip the reinitializing of your databases to avoid duplicating data. This option, used with the “pg_dumpall” command will cause the restore to clean out all the objects in the database before performing the restore. If you didn’t include this option, then just delete the data directory and reinitialize the database as shown below.

For getting a copy of a live system’s postgres databases onto a development platform, it’s easiest to just dump the whole thing and restore it on the dev machine.