Re: What is safe to exclude when doing a UFS backup?

Marty Scholes wrote:
> We are running a tiny (< 1GB) Pg installation, but are starting to
> migrate over our production Oracle apps.
>
> We run a daily Oracle dump and a daily Pg dump to /var/tmp, keeping the
> most recent four versions of each.
>
> Nightly, we have Veritas Netbackup backup the whole filesystem to a tape
> library.
>
> Currently, the Oracle data directory (which also has the redo logs) is
> excluded from the UFS backup as those datafiles are 100 GB and are
> completely useless in a restore.
>
> I have not excluded the Pg data files since I don't know what is safe to
> exclude and the files are very small.
>
> As we migrate apps and the Pg install grows, we will need to exclude
> those data files.
>
> Which directories/files are safe to exclude from the UFS backup?  In
> other words, what files can Pg live without and still get off the ground
> far enough to restore from a pg_dump?

You need to back up all the files in /data, but none of the subdirectories.

We should make this easier to do someday.

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