Downloading Large Heroku Postgres Backups

Easily one of my favorite things about developing apps with Heroku is its bevy of console commands that make it easy to manage Postgres databases. Recently, however, as one of my apps crossed the threshold from a small “hobby” tier database to a larger “standard” database, the heroku CLI started warning me that several of my favorite commands could risk degrading the database’s performance and its availability to my production application.[Related: I ignored these warnings and ran the commands anyway, only for Bugsnag to send me dozens of emails as my users began to experience database network timeouts and transaction failures. Would not recommend.].