I am in the process of configuring the backup gem (http://backup.github.io/backup/v4/) to run on my EC2 instance, copy the PostgreSQL database in RDS, and store the backup in a new S3 bucket.
The backup gem runs the pg_dump command, however AWS doesn't allow for the same version of Postgres to be installed on both EC2 and RDS, resulting in the following error:
pg_dump: server version: 9.4.7; pg_dump version: 9.2.13
pg_dump: aborting because of server version mismatch
This is because the EC2 instance has version:
$ pg_dump --version
pg_dump (PostgreSQL) 9.2.13
And the RDS instance has version:
9.4.7-R1 (with the only other version option of 9.5.2-R1)
On EC2, running yum list postgres* only offers Available Packages up to PostgreSQL 9.3.
So it seems like I am unable to either downgrade RDS or upgrade EC2 to a matching version.
Here is my Backup gem model config if it helps: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/35f6f9e81846f53693fb03662c2192ad
Before too many people start reminding me that RDS has built-in backups, I am aware. My use-case: instead of only having full database fallbacks, I would also like the ability to roll back individual users' data to different time periods without affecting the whole database. I planned on keeping these manual backups and eventually writing a script to pull previous user specific data from them.
My friend recommended another option: If a user wants to roll back, I could spin up a new RDS from the automated snapshots, clone my EC2 instance, connect them to each other, collect the user specific data from that snapshot, and then merge those changes back into the main EC2 instance.
