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I'm running out of space from my hard drive which has a 18GB PostgreSQL database.
When I try pg_dump to a different drive, PostgreSQL creates temporary files on the disk it's dumping from, so I run out of space and the dump fails.

I tried this from Stackoverflow and a small file is created in the new directory, but nothing else, and pg_dump still writes to the original disk.

How do I change temp directory for pg_dump?

Note: My work_mem setting is pretty high already, I can't change that.
My db version is 9.0.13.

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  • Can you mount the temp dir (is it /tmp?) on an other disk?
    – dezso
    Oct 29, 2013 at 9:15
  • Yes, I could put it to another disk, but don't know how to safely do that?
    – kissgyorgy
    Oct 29, 2013 at 13:42
  • 1
    How are you invoking pg_dump? Where is the temp file, what is it called?
    – Peter Eisentraut
    Oct 29, 2013 at 20:04
  • pg_dump -U myusername 'database' --format=tar | gzip > /anotherdrive/filetodump.tar.gz What temp file is where?
    – kissgyorgy
    Oct 29, 2013 at 20:25
  • I guess that is the temp file that gzip uses, not one from pg_dump
    – user1822
    Nov 3, 2013 at 14:17

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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+50

The temporary files are a side effect of the --format=tar option.

A backup in default plain format goes through without temporary tables in the local drive. Omit the option to produce a backup in plain format without temporary local files.

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