Re: Online Backup and WAL archives

Morus Walter <morus(dot)walter(at)tanto(dot)de> writes:
> The documentation says
> ' To make use of this backup, you will need to keep around all the
> WAL segment files generated at or after the starting time of the backup. '
> Now I'm wondering how much of these WAL segment files do I really need
> in order to recover the databases to a consistent state.

If you are satisfied with recovering to the state shortly after you
completed the backup, then it would be sufficient to have a set of WAL
files spanning the time period in which the backup is done. I'm dubious
that this is necessarily an improvement over a pg_dump backup, though.

> I expect the online backup to faster on recovery than an SQL dump, since
> the latter would imply recreation of indexes during recovery.

Is that assumption founded on any hard evidence?

regards, tom lane