---
title: Solving failing manual backup and restore operations
description: Learn to resolve failing backup restore issues in Scaleway SQL databases.
tags: database serverless-sql-database unable fail backup troubleshooting restore error
dates:
  validation: 2025-09-02
  posted: 2024-02-07
---

## Manual SQL backup and restore fails

### Problem

When creating or restoring backup manually (i.e. via SQL Administration tools such as pgAdmin, or directly via SQL commands), some errors may occur.

### Cause

These issues are caused by using `pg_dump` and `pg_restore` versions that are not compatible with PostgreSQL 16 (on which Serverless SQL Databases rely).

### Solution

To solve these issues, upgrade your `pg_dump` and/or `pg_restore` modules:

- You can upgrade them by installing PostgreSQL 16 which includes these tools.
- If you are using a third-party tool that includes these libraries, upgrade your tool. For instance, pgAdmin supports PostgreSQL 16 ecosystem from version 7.8.

## Automated backup fails due to long-running queries

### Problem

When performing long-running queries (lasting several hours or days), backup operations might not be performed successfully. Backup status will then appear as `error` or `unknown_status`.

### Cause

These issues are caused by queries locking database rows (usually long running transactions), preventing logical backup operations from reading database rows.

### Solution

To solve these issues, stop these queries:

- List PostgreSQL processes and identify the ones that have been running transactions since several hours ('xact_start' column) with the following command:
    ```
    SELECT pid, state, usename, query, xact_start, query_start FROM pg_stat_activity ORDER BY xact_start;
    ```
- Stop the corresponding queries with:
    ```
    SELECT pg_cancel_backend({pid});
    ```
    Where `{pid}` is the process id from the long-running query causing the issue (`pid` column of the previous step).

Alternatively, you can also stop long-running queries using a graphical PostgreSQL client such as [pgAdmin](https://www.pgadmin.org/) or [DBeaver](https://dbeaver.io/).