Re: Inherited an 18TB DB & need to backup

On 15/05/20, Suhail Bamzena (suhailsalem(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> Hello All,
> I have very recently inherited an 18 TB DB that is running version 9.2.
> Apparently this database has never been backed up and I have been tasked to
> set in a periodic backup routine (weekly full & daily incremental) and dump
> it into a NAS. What is the best way to go about this? Did some reading and
> hear that pgbackrest does a good job with such huge sizes. Your expert
> advise is needed.

Incremental backups suggest the need to backup WAL archives. See
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/continuous-archiving.html

pgbackrest looks very cool but we haven't used it.

A very simple solution could be just to dump the database daily with
pg_dump, if you have the space and machine capacity to do it. Depending
on what you are storing, you can achieve good compression with this, and
it is a great way of having a simple file from which to restore a
database.

Our ~200GB cluster resolves to under 10GB of pg_dump files, although
18TB is a whole different order of size.

Rory