Re: Streaming a base backup from master

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 15:24, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Heikki Linnakangas
>> <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
>>> Here's a WIP patch. It adds a new "TAKE_BACKUP" command to the replication
>>> command set. Upon receiving that command, the master starts a COPY, and
>>> streams a tarred copy of the data directory to the client. The patch
>>> includes a simple command-line tool, pg_streambackup, to connect to a server
>>> and request a backup that you can then redirect to a .tar file or pipe to
>>> "tar x".
>>
>> Cool. Can you add a TODO to build in code to un-tar the archive? tar
>> is not usually found on Windows systems, and as we already have tar
>> extraction code in pg_restore it could presumably be added relatively
>> painlessly.
>
> It seems like the elephant in the room here is updating an existing
> backup without recopying the entire data directory.  Perhaps that's
> phase two, but worth keeping in mind...

I'd say that's a very different use-case, but still a very useful one
of course. It's probably going to be a lot more complex (it would
require bi-directional traffic, I think)...


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 Magnus Hagander
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