Daily Postgresql Backup by Batch File

Recently I installed PostgreSQL on a Windows 2003 server. I also wanted to back up one of the PostgreSQL databases to a folder on the server on a daily basis as an extra precautionary measure. PostgreSQL comes with a program called pg_dump which can be used to create a back up of a database. You give it the database to back up, the file to back up to and it does all the work for you.
The extra work needed here is to back up to a file name that differs each day so that you can have a folder of back ups per day. It would be handy for pg_dump to generate a file name based on date but it doesn’t. So I created a batch file to do the job in one go including a file name based on the date.

@echo off
set date=%date:/=_%
set BACKUP_FILE=D:\PostgreSQL_Backups\DBName\DBName_%date%.backup
pg_dump -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres -F p -b -v -f %BACKUP_FILE% DBName

Then I created a Windows task scheduled to run daily which just runs the above batch file.