Re: is backing up a live postgres enough?

Louis-David Mitterrand <vindex(at)apartia(dot)org> writes:
> I recently restored a debian system from off-site rsync'ed copie of
> /{var,etc,home} including a large Postgres db in /var/lib/postgres/data.
> FWIW the rsync backup was run nightly on the _live_ system with all
> daemons active.

> The db started fine on the restored filesystem. Was I lucky?

Exceedingly. Are you *sure* your data is okay --- have you actually run
any consistency checks? I'd be looking for partially-committed
transactions, broken indexes, that sort of thing.

> What is the accepted practice w.r.t Postgres backups?

*NOT* that.

regards, tom lane