Re: Failing to recover after panic shutdown

Per Lauvås wrote:
> Hi, and thanks for the replies!
>
> OK. I think we will reconsider this. The backup procedure was set up
> a few years ago. I have personally made several point in time
> recoveries using this technique (for testing purposes), and it works.
> But I guess an undesirable side-effect is a recovery failure every
> now and then.

I'm afraid it may be one of those things that appears to work, because
it works much of the time, but once you have an actual failure, it
might not work :-( I wouldn't trust it, really.

> And, Magnus: The DB is producing about 25 WALs each day (I guess it
> will increase to at least 144 with a 10 min timeout). Do you know how
> often a base backup is taken out there by the average administrator?
> I am getting fed up with doing a new base backup each week. Could the
> base backup operation be automated?

Uh, yeah, sure. You can script it (though scripting on Windows
using .bat files certainly isn't fun, you can use any kind of scripting
language to do it). A pretty nice way is actually to use VSS - you just
do a pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup(). If your regular backup
software uses VSS and supports pre/post scripts, you can use those to
implement it...

> And good luck with the Euro championship (if you are from Sweden).

I am - thanks :-)

//Magnus