Re: doing backups

NO!!!!

You don't want to give ANY account root access or root level security!

I run my backups FROM root using cron, but root can su to any account
that it likes!

I have some ksh code tucked away that will be easy to convert to bash
that will run commands as a particular user and will check their return
codes, etc.

In fact, I would be very interested in co-developing a solution provided
that it would be OpenSourced as, at the the moment, we have backup
script that do pg_dumps from the individual user accts.

Another thing to consider is backing up the directories that the
database are stored in.

For that matter, I am currently thinking a lot about fail-over between
more than one server at a database level (yes, that dreaded database
replication!!!!).
This would seem an essential next step for PostgreSQL and would
certainly throw it into a very much bigger league!

Bradley Kieser
Director
Kieser.net

Jeff MacDonald wrote:

> hi folks,
>
> I'm writing out a nightly backup script for a machine.
> This machine has many databases, running on different ports.
> ie: 5432,5433 etc..
>
> These servers are ""owned"" (use term loosly) by users on the
> system, and some users have choses to set passwds. which is
> 100% within their right.
>
> However that makes it a pain for postgres to do pg_dumps.
>
> Now if you make pgsql user and postgresql analgous to
> root and unix, the postgres user shouldn't need a passwd.
>
> anyone care to discuss this topic ?
>
> Jeff MacDonald
> jeff@pgsql.com