Re: Taking rsynced base-backup without wal-archiving enabled

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 09:28:06PM -0500, Rene Romero Benavides wrote:
> It depends on the database transactional activity,
> observe how many new wal files are generated during a period equivalent to what
> it takes to do your base backup. I would set it to twice that number. Take into
> account that a checkpoint is issued at the beginning of the process. If you're
> lazy just try setting it to something very high such as 256 or more to prevent
> wal files being recycled during the process.
>
>
> 2014-06-23 2:12 GMT-05:00 J rgen Fuchsberger <juergen(dot)fuchsberger(at)gmx(dot)at>:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Can I do a consistent file-system-level backup using the following
> procedure:
>
> 1) SELECT pg_start_backup(...)
> 2) rsync postgres data dir to another server
> 3) SELECT pg_stop_backup()
> 4) rsync pg_xlog directory
>
> >From what I understand this should be similar to running pg_basebackup
> using the -x parameter, correct? One caveat seems to be that
> wal_keep_segments should be set "high enough". Can anybody tell what
> "high enough" usually is?

I am coming late to this thread, but it seems easier for the user to set
archive_command to something meaningful during start/stop backup, and
set it to /bin/true at other times. I realize they can't turn
archive_mode on/off without a restart.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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