Re: [HACKERS] Point in Time Recovery

I think we should push the partially complete WAL file to the archive
location before shutdown. I talked to you or Jan about it and you (or
Jan) wouldn't bite either, but I think when someone shuts down, they
assume they have things fully archived and can recover fully with a
previous backup and the archive files.

When you are running and finally fill up the WAL file it would then
overwrite the one in the archive but I think that is OK. Maybe we would
need to give it a special file extension so we only use it when we don't
have a full version.

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Tom Lane wrote:
> Mark Kirkwood <markir(at)coretech(dot)co(dot)nz> writes:
> > Here is one for the 'idiot proof' category:
> > 1) initdb and set archive_command
> > 2) shutdown
> > 3) do a backup
> > 4) startup and run some transactions
> > 5) shutdown and remove PGDATA
> > 6) restore backup
> > 7) startup
>
> > Obviously this does not work as the backup is performed with the
> > database shutdown.
>
> Huh? It works fine.
>
> The bit you may be missing is that if you blow away $PGDATA including
> pg_xlog/, you won't be able to recover past whatever you have in your WAL
> archive area. The archive is certainly not going to include the current
> partially-filled WAL segment, and it might be missing a few earlier
> segments if the archival process isn't speedy. So you need to keep
> those recent segments in pg_xlog/ if you want to recover to current time
> or near-current time.
>
> I'm becoming more and more convinced that we should bite the bullet and
> move pg_xlog/ to someplace that is not under $PGDATA. It would just
> make things a whole lot more reliable, both for backup and to deal with
> scenarios like yours above. I tried to talk Bruce into this on the
> phone the other day, but he wouldn't bite. I still think it's a good
> idea though. It would
> (1) eliminate the problem that a tar backup of $PGDATA would restore
> stale copies of xlog segments, because the tar wouldn't include
> pg_xlog in the first place.
> (2) eliminate the problem that a naive "rm -rf $PGDATA" would blow away
> xlog segments that you still need.
>
> A possible compromise is that we should strongly suggest that pg_xlog
> be pushed out to another place and symlinked if you are going to use
> WAL archiving. That's already considered good practice for performance
> if you have a separate disk spindle to put WAL on. It'll just have
> to be good practive for WAL archiving too.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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