Heroku is launching a new database backup solution. Heroku PG Backups is available immediately and is the officially supported and recommended method of backing up your PostgreSQL database on Heroku.

PG Backups is a significant architectural improvement over Bundles and is designed to handle the large-scale, production databases that are being deployed to Heroku today. In addition to these backend improvements, PG Backups offers several new features:

• Backups are captured using pg_dump’s -Fc compressed format. This is the most reliable, fastest way of capturing backups from PostgreSQL.
• Data can be easily imported to your application – the pgbackups:restore command can restore from a URL containing a PostgreSQL export.
• Backups captured with PG Backups can be made available as a time-limited URL for download and transfer.

The basic plan allows you to store two backups for free, and the plus plan allows you to store seven backups.

You can install PG backups on your application and capture your first backup immediately:

$ sudo gem install heroku
$ heroku addons:add pgbackups:basic
$ heroku pgbackups:capture