Backup strategies with significant bytea data

Hi,

For years now I've simply backed up my databases by doing a nightly
pg_dump, but since we added the ability for users to import binary files
in to our application, which are stored in a bytea fields, the dump
sizes have gone through the roof — even with gzip compression, they're
significantly larger than the on-disk size of the database. My guess is
that this due to the way that the binary data from the bytea fields is
encoded in the dump file when it's produced.

Is there any way I can reduce the size of my pg_dump files?
Alternatively, are there other backup methods worth investigating? PITR
looks promising, but I have about a dozen databases on the machine, and
I'd need to be able to restore them individually.

Thanks
Leigh

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