Re: [Beginner Question] Will the backup wal file take too much storage space?

On 6/13/23 06:34, Francisco Olarte wrote:
[snip]
> But if you want to restore to ANY point in time you would need a copy
> of the initial state of the database and ALL the wal files. Normally
> you do not want to do this, at most you want to restore to "any point
> in the last 3 days", in which case you will need a copy of the
> datafiles from 3 days ago plus all the wals from there plus change.
[snip]
> This is confusing. WALs are not backup per se, they are a recovery
> mechanism. You do a backup of the main data files and the wal files
> because you do not want to stop the world to do the backup. The COPY
> of the datafiles and the wals is the backup. If you want to restore to
> a very far point in a DB which has very large files it will take a lot
> of space. But if you did it that way the copy of the data files will
> not be in the initial ( empty ) copy of the datafiles, it will just be
> in the wal copy, and it needs to be somewhere if you want to do that.

PgBackRest (and presumably barman) handles all this for you.  Even
compresses the WAL and data files.

--
Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia.