Re: Incremental Backup

Craig Barnes wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Wouldn’t incremental backup be achieved by archiving the WAL files?
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/continuous-archiving.html
>
> Regards
>
> Craig

That depends on how do you define an incremental backup.  Being a former
system administrator,  my definition of an incremental backup is a
backup that only backs up files changed since the last backup. You will
find that to be  the most frequent definition of the phrase "incremental
backup". In addition to that, it would be highly impractical to make a
single hot backup and than have a gazillion archives to recover. What
you're talking about is called hot backup and point in time recovery,
but not an incremental backup.
For what is worth, I find incremental backups impractical. With an
incremental backup, one also has to restore the full backup and all
incremental backups after it, which sort of misses the point.  I do a
full on-line (hot) backup weekly and a  daily archive backup.

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Mladen Gogala
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