pg_dump is not a backup strategy on its own
Logical dumps are portable and easy to reason about, which makes them ideal for small to mid-size databases and for moving data between major versions. They also lock in a single point in time and get slower roughly in line with database size.
Once a dump takes longer than your maintenance window, move to physical base backups plus continuous WAL archiving so you can recover to any second, not just to last night.
Keep an eye on bloat and long transactions
Backup duration is often a symptom rather than a cause. Table bloat, unvacuumed indexes and long-running transactions inflate both your backup size and your restore time. Real-time monitoring next to your backup schedule turns those trends into something you can see before they become an incident.
Encrypt before it leaves the host
Backups contain every row your application has, including the ones your access controls normally protect. Encrypt at the source so that the only place plaintext exists is on the database host itself, and keep the key in your own vault rather than a vendor's.
