dealing with file size when archiving databases

From: "Andrew L(dot) Gould" <algould(at)datawok(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: dealing with file size when archiving databases
Date: 2005-06-21 02:28:51
Message-ID: 200506202128.51463.algould@datawok.com
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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.

My proposed solution is to modify my python script to:

1. use pg_dump to dump each database's tables individually, including
both the database and table name in the file name;
3. use 'pg_dumpall -g' to dump the global information; and
4. burn the backup directories, files and a recovery script to DVD-R.

The script will pipe pg_dump into gzip to compress the files.

My questions are:

1. Will 'pg_dumpall -g' dump everything not dumped by pg_dump? Will I
be missing anything?
2. Does anyone foresee any problems with the solution above?

Thanks,

Andrew Gould

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