Re: Backup routine

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Enio Schutt Junior" <enio(at)pmpf(dot)rs(dot)gov(dot)br> writes:
> > Here, where I work, the backups of the postgresql databases are being done =
> > the following way:
> > There is a daily copy of nearly all the hd (excluding /tmp, /proc, /dev and=
> > so on) in which databases are=20
> > and besides this there is also one script which makes the pg_dump of each o=
> > ne of the databases on the server.
> > This daily copy of the hd is made with postmaster being active (without sto=
> > pping the daemon), so the data
> > from /usr/local/pgsql/data would not be 100% consistent, I guess.=20
> > Supposing there was a failure and it was needed to restore the whole thing,=
> > I think the procedure to
> > recovery would be the following:
> > 1) Copy data from the backup hd to a new hd
> > 2) Once this was done, delete the postmaster.pid file and start the postmas=
> > ter service
> > 3) Drop all databases and recreate them from those pg_dump files
>
> I would just initdb and then load the pg_dump files. An unsynchronized
> copy of /usr/local/pgsql/data is just about completely untrustworthy.
>
> You should use pg_dumpall to make a dump of user and group status;
> pg_dump will not do that.
>
> > I was also thinking about excluding /usr/local/pgsql/data from the
> > backup routine, as the data is also in other files generated by
> > pg_dump. The problem is that this directory has not only the databases
> > data but also some config files, like postgresql.conf.
>
> Yeah. Instead, exclude the directories below it ($PGDATA/base, etc).

Yes, but if he restores everything but /base, he gets xlog and clog, and
other stuff he shouldn't be restoring. This is why I would like the
config files move into a separate directory under /data.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
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