Re: incremental backups

I didn't read your mail very carefully, but I guess you want:

- turn on WAL archiving, and archive all WAL logs;
- take the file system backup at regular time points, optionally you
can keep them also for point in time recovery;

Then you always have all the WAL files you need to recover to any point
in time you need. You can then supply all the WAL files which are needed
by the last file system backup to recover after a crash, or you can
supply all the WAL files up to the time point just before your student
DBA deleted all your data.

HTH,
Csaba.

On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 18:33, Rick Gigger wrote:
> I am looking into using WAL archiving for incremental backups. It
> all seems fairly straightforward except for one thing.
>
> So you set up the archiving of the WAL files. Then you set up cron
> or something to regularly do a physical backup of the data
> directory. But when you do the physical backup you don't have the
> last WAL file archived yet that you need to restore that physical
> backup. So you always need to keep at least two physical backups
> around so that you know that at least one of them has the WAL files
> needed for recovery.
>
> The question I have is: how do I know if I can use the latest one?
> That is if I first do physical backup A and then later do physical
> backup B and then I want to do a restore. How do I know when I've
> got the files I need to use B so that I don't have to go all the way
> back to A?
>
> My initial thoughts are that I could:
>
> a) just before or after calling pg_stop_backup check the file system
> to see what the last archived WAL file is on disk and make sure that
> that I get the next one before I try restoring from that backup.
>
> b) just before or after calling pg_stop_backup check postgres to see
> to see what the current active WAL file is and make sure it has been
> archived before I try to restore from that backup.
>
> c) Always just use backup A.
>
> No c seems the easiest but is that even fail safe? I realize it
> wouldn't really ever happen in an active production environment that
> was set up right but say you did backup A and backup B and during
> that whole time you had few writes in postgres that you never filled
> up a whole WAL file so both of the backups are invalid. Then you
> would have to always go to option a or b above to verify that a given
> backup was good so that any previous backups could be deleted.
>
> Wouldn't it make things a lot easier if the backup history file not
> only gave you the name of the first file that you need but also the
> last one? Then you could look at a given backup and say I need this
> start file and this end file. Then you could delete all archived WAL
> files before start file. And you could delete any old physical dumps
> because you know that your last physical dump was good. It would
> just save you the step in the backups process of figuring out what
> that file is. And it seems like pg_stop_backup could determine that
> on it's own.
>
> Does that make sense? Am I totally off base here?
>
> Rick
>
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