How to back up a Heroku production database to staging

It’s right there in the docs but I didn’t notice it until recently:

heroku pgbackups:restore DATABASE `heroku pgbackups:url --remote production` --remote staging

Boom! It transfers the production Postgres database to staging.

It’s much faster than db:pull, then db:push, which is what I used to do (like a sucker).

Setup:

git remote add staging git@heroku.com:my-staging-app.git
git remote add production git@heroku.com:my-production-app.git
heroku addons:add pgbackups --remote staging
heroku addons:add pgbackups --remote production

Create a database backup at any time:

heroku pgbackups:capture --remote production

View backups:

heroku pgbackups --remote production

Destroy a backup:

heroku pgbackups:destroy b003 --remote production