Postgresql database recovery

Question

Do I always need to delete and then create a database to restore it from the pg_dump file? If I do not delete the database, the restored data is added to the current data in the database, even if some register is already in the database (so the data is duplicated).

Answer 1

You can use the -c (--clean) option while pg_dump is running, so the dump will contain the correct DROP commands ...

But overall, I would suggest going the "hard way":

dropdb ...
createdb ...
psql -d ... -f dump.file

Thus, you are sure that there are no "left frames" from what was previously in the database.