Re: Backup Method

Am 2015-07-03 13:00, schrieb howardnews@selestial.com:
> On 03/07/2015 11:39, Guillaume Lelarge wrote:
>>
>> > In that case is there any recommendation for how often to make
>> base backups in relation to the size of the cluster and the size of
>> the WAL?
>> >
>>
>> Nope, not really. That depends on a lot of things. Our customers
>> usually do one per day.
>>
>>
> Excuse my ignorance... Is the base backup, in general, faster than
> pg_dump?

It is a different approach. With the base backup you are actually
backing up files from the filesystem ($PGDATA directory), whereas with
pg_dump your saving the SQL commands to reload and rebuild the database.
"Usually" a file based backup will be faster, both on backup and
restore, but it is - as mentioned - a different approach and it might
also not serve all your purposes.

That is why I do weekly base backups (plus WAL Archiving) and use
pg_dump in a parallel way to do "logical" backups every night.

Regards,

Jan