Re: dealing with file size when archiving databases

"Andrew L. Gould" <algould(at)datawok(dot)com> writes:
> I've been backing up my databases by piping pg_dump into gzip and
> burning the resulting files to a DVD-R. Unfortunately, FreeBSD has
> problems dealing with very large files (>1GB?) on DVD media. One of my
> compressed database backups is greater than 1GB; and the results of a
> gzipped pg_dumpall is approximately 3.5GB. The processes for creating
> the iso image and burning the image to DVD-R finish without any
> problems; but the resulting file is unreadable/unusable.

Yech. However, I think you are reinventing the wheel in your proposed
solution. Why not just use split(1) to divide the output of pg_dump or
pg_dumpall into slices that the DVD software won't choke on? See
notes at
http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/backup.html#BACKUP-DUMP-LARGE

regards, tom lane