Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to the most common questions about Postgresus, including installation, configuration and backup strategies.

How to backup localhost databases?

If you're running Postgresus in Docker and want to back up databases running on your host machine (localhost), you need to configure Docker to use host network mode.

By default, Docker containers run in an isolated network and cannot access services on localhost. The host network mode allows the container to share the host's network namespace.

Solution for Docker Compose:

Update your docker-compose.yml file to use network_mode: host:

services:
  postgresus:
    container_name: postgresus
    image: rostislavdugin/postgresus:latest
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - ./postgresus-data:/postgresus-data
    restart: unless-stopped

Solution for Docker run:

Use the --network host flag:

docker run -d \
  --name postgresus \
  --network host \
  -v ./postgresus-data:/postgresus-data \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  rostislavdugin/postgresus:latest

💡 Note: When using host network mode, you can connect to your localhost database using 127.0.0.1 or localhost as the host in your Postgresus backup configuration. You'll also access the Postgresus UI directly at http://localhost:4005 without port mapping.

⚠️ Important for Windows and macOS users: The host network mode only works natively on Linux. On Windows and macOS, Docker runs inside a Linux VM, so host.docker.internal should be used instead of localhost as the database host address in your backup configuration.

Why does Postgresus not use raw SQL dump format?

Postgresus uses the pg_dump's directory format with zstd compression at level 5 instead of the plain SQL format because it provides the most efficient balance between:

  • Backup creation speed
  • Restore speed
  • File size compression (up to 20x times smaller than plain SQL format)

This decision was made after extensive testing and benchmarking of different PostgreSQL backup formats and compression methods. You can read more about testing here PostgreSQL backups: comparing pg_dump speed in different formats and with different compression.

Postgresus will not include raw SQL dump format, because:

  • extra variety is bad for UX;
  • makes it harder to support the code;
  • current dump format is suitable for 99% of the cases

As for Nov 2025 Postgresus is going to add incremental backups support. So this is priority in addition to current dump format.

Where is Postgresus installed if installed via .sh script?

Postgresus is installed in /opt/postgresus/ directory.