Re: Problem with pg_baselinebackup

John, I believe that in Postgres-land, the term 'pgdata' has a fairly standard 
meaning which lets you tell the program where your database directory is if it 
isn't in a standard location, that might be part of it. -- Darren Duncan

On 1/16/2014, 9:18 AM, Sebastian, John (CONTR) wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I’m pretty new to Postgres. I have an extensive Oracle and MySQL background here.
>
> We are putting up test and production servers.
>
> I’m interested in doing online backups with WAL archiving turned on so that I
> can do point in time recovery.
>
> My database files are stored in /u01/postgres/data and
> /u02/postgres/data/confluence_data directories.
>
> My WAL files are in /u03/postgres/data/pg_log
>
> I want to backup my database to the directory
> /u03/postgres_backups/pg_basebackups/”directoryname_date_timestamp”
>
> I’m trying a command like this:
>
> $ pg_basebackup -x
> --pgdata=/u03/postgres_backups/pg_basebackups/pg_basebackup_16-Jan-2014:10:15:00
> --label=TEST
>
> After entering the password, I’m receiving the following error:
>
> pg_basebackup: directory "/u02/postgres/data/confluence_data" exists but is not
> empty
>
> The directory that it is complaining about
> ("/u02/postgres/data/confluence_data"  is a database directory with database
> data in it.  Not the directory where I want the backup files to go.  I expected
> that the switch
>
> --pgdata=/u03/postgres_backups/pg_basebackups/pg_basebackup_16-Jan-2014:10:15:00
>
> Would send the backup to that directory.  Can anyone enlighten me on why it
> would complain about a directory where database files reside?
>