Re: BUG #4548: Documentation Contradiction for 8.3

On Monday 24 November 2008 23:37:02 Barry Reddy wrote:
> Can anyone clarify if this apparent contradiction is an oversight ? =C2=
=A0Old
> documentation with new archiving documentation patched on, with no
> attention paid to the seeming contradiction on guidelines for filesystem
> backups of a running PG database ?

It is not trivial to understand the difference.  Perhaps the documentation=
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doesn't make that entirely clear.

When you do a base backup with archiving on, that backup is only usable=20
together with the WAL segments that were written while the backup mode was=
=20
active.

So you can either make a backup: shutdown, tar, start
And then recover with: shutdown, untar, start

Or make a backup: pg_start_backup, tar, pg_stop_backup
And then recover with: shutdown, untar, recovery

In particular, it will *not* work to do:

Backup: pg_start_backup, tar, pg_stop_backup
Restore: shutdown, untar, start

So if you read both sections separately, they are correct.  It is only the=
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partial overlap in the otherwise diffferent procedures that is confusing.