How to create a backup of a single table in a postgres database?

Question

Use --table to tell pg_dump what table it has to backup:

pg_dump --host localhost --port 5432 --username postgres --format plain --verbose --file "<abstract_file_path>" --table public.tablename dbname

If you are on Ubuntu,

1. Login to your postgres user sudo su postgres
2. pg_dump -d <database_name> -t <table_name> > file.sql

Make sure that you are executing the command where the postgres user have write permissions (Example: /tmp)

Edit

If you want to dump the .sql in another computer, you may need to consider skipping the owner information getting saved into the .sql file.

You can use pg_dump --no-owner -d <database_name> -t <table_name> > file.sql

pg_dump -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres -d mydb -t my_table > backup.sql

You can take the backup of a single table but I would suggest to take the backup of whole database and then restore whichever table you need. It is always good to have backup of whole database.

9 ways to use pg_dump

If you prefer a graphical user interface, you can use pgAdmin III (Linux/Windows/OS X). Simply right click on the table of your choice, then "backup". It will create a pg_dump command for you.

As an addition to Frank Heiken's answer, if you wish to use INSERT statements instead of copy from stdin, then you should specify the --inserts flag

pg_dump --host localhost --port 5432 --username postgres --format plain --verbose --file "<abstract_file_path>" --table public.tablename --inserts dbname

Notice that I left out the --ignore-version flag, because it is deprecated.

you can use this command

pg_dump --table=yourTable --data-only --column-inserts yourDataBase > file.sql

you should change yourTable, yourDataBase to your case