Re: XLogArchivingActive

On May 25, 2006, at 11:24 AM, Andreas Pflug wrote:
>> BTW, I don't actually understand why you want this at all.  If you're
>> not going to keep a continuing series of WAL files, you don't have  
>> any
>> PITR capability.  What you're proposing seems like a bulky,  
>> unportable,
>> hard-to-use equivalent of pg_dump.  Why not use pg_dump?
>
> Because pg_dump will take too long and create bloated dump files.  
> All I need is a physical backup for disaster recovery purposes  
> without bringing down the server.
>
> In my case, I'd expect a DB that uses 114GB on disk to consume  
> 1.4TB when pg_dumped, too much for the available backup capacity  
> (esp. compared to net content, about 290GB). See other post  
> "inefficient bytea escaping" for details.

Another consideration is that you can use rsync to update a  
filesystem-level backup, but there's no pg_dump equivalent. On a  
large database that can make a sizable difference in the amount of  
time required for a backup.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461