The pg_basebackup command-line tool can create various formats. By default, it will put data in an empty directory. Essentially, it will connect to the source server and create a .tar file over a network connection and put the data into the desired directory.

The trouble with this approach is that pg_basebackup will create many files, which is not suitable if we want to move the backup to an external backup solution such as Tivoli Storage Manager. The following listing shows the valid output formats supported by pg_basebackup:

-F, --format=p|t             output format (plain (default), tar)

To create a single file, we can use the -F=t option. By default, it will create a file called base.tar, which can then be managed more easily. The downside, of course, is that we have to inflate the file again before performing PITR.