# How to convert a Heroku Postgres dump to plain text

Sometimes you need to search within backups but don't want to restore the dump to a real database.

Backup files produced by Heroku Postgres are compressed. So they need to be converted to plain text.

1. Download a backup file and name it e.g. `input.dump`
2. Convert `input.dump` to plain text using `pg_restore`:

```
pg_restore --format=c --file=output.sql input.dump
```

3. Read contents
```
cat output.sql | grep 'important api key'
```