Migrating data to TimescaleDB from a different PostgreSQL database

You can migrate your data into TimescaleDB from a different PostgreSQL database.

To migrate between TimescaleDB databases, for example from self-hosted TimescaleDB to Timescale Cloud, see the guide to migrating your TimescaleDB database to Cloud.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, check that you have:

Installed and set up TimescaleDB within your PostgreSQL instance
Installed the PostgreSQL pg_dump utility
Installed a client for connecting to PostgreSQL. These instructions use psql, but any client works.

Migrate your data into TimescaleDB from a different PostgreSQL database.

Copy the database schema from your source database into a backup file named source_db.bak. This file contains the SQL commands to recreate all the tables in your source database.
```
pg_dump --schema-only -f source_db.bak <SOURCE_DB_NAME>
```
Recreate these tables in your destination database by copying out of the source_db.bak file.
```
psql -d <DESTINATION_DB_NAME> < source_db.bak
```
Connect to your destination database.
```
psql -d <DESTINATION_DB_NAME>
```
Turn tables that contain time-series data into hypertables by using the create_hypertable function. This function must be run on a table while it’s empty. For example, for a time-series table named conditions that uses time as its time partitioning column, run:
```
\SELECT create_hypertable('conditions', 'time');
```

Copy the data from your source database table into a .csv.

psql -d <SOURCE_DB_NAME> -c "\COPY (SELECT * FROM <TABLE_NAME>) TO <FILENAME>.csv DELIMITER ',' CSV"

Repeat for any other tables in your database.

Insert the data from the .csv into your destination database’s hypertables. For detailed instructions, see the CSV import guide.

To learn what you can do with your hypertable data, read about common hypertable commands.