Re: Incremental / Level -1 backup in PG

Greetings,

* rakeshkumar464 (rakeshkumar464(at)outlook(dot)com) wrote:
> >The short answer is 'no'. There are complications around this,
> >particularly at the edges and because files can be written and rewritten
> >as you're reading them.
> >Basically, no file with a timestamp after the
> >checkpoint before the backup can be omitted from an incremental backup.
>
> what you have written above applies to oracle/db2 too. In case you are not
> aware, during backup, those products have a mechanism to save the image
> of any changing block as it existed before the start of the backup. that is
> used
> to reconstruct the PIT image of the block.

That is WAL archiving, which PG already does, but is different from
backups.

> Anyhow looks like this can't be done in PG.

PG does support WAL archiving, as discussed on this thread, and it works
exactly as you describe above. As I mentioned, there are also tools for
performing incremental backups, which isn't quite the same as straight
WAL archiving.

Thanks!

Stephen