Re: Practice of backups

On Nov 19, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Jesper Krogh wrote:

> Michael Graziano wrote:
>> None that I know of from within the database environment, but you can
>> grab a copy of the data directory off the filesystem.  Note that this
>> requires stopping the DB server though, as a backup grabbed while
>> the DB
>> is running may have issues.
>
> Not if you have enabled PITR and tell the database that you do so:
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/continuous-archiving.html
>
> Works excellent..

That's true - I forgot about pg_start_backup / pg_stop_backup (which
is sad considering I use them every time I roll a new slave...)

Doing the backup that way avoids the outage in my filesystem
snapshotting example and isn't dependent on OS-level capabilities so
it's definitely a better way to go.

-MG