Re: Backing up large databases

Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 15:57 +0000, Steve Burrows wrote:
>> I am struggling to find an acceptable way of backing up a PostgreSQL
>> 7.4 database.

Depending on your OS and hardware setup, you may have other options,
such as Veritas snapshotting. It is expensive, but saves time.
>>
>> The database is quite large, currently it occupies about 180GB,
>> divided into two elements, a set of active tables and a set of archive
>> tables which are only used for insertions.
>>
>> I ran pg_dump -Fc recently, it took 23.5 hours to run, and output a
>> single file of 126GB. Obviously as the database continues to grow it
>> will soon be so large that it cannot be pg_dumped within a day.
>> Running rsync to do a complete fresh copy of the pgsql file structure
>> took 4 hours, but later that day running another iteration of rsync
>> (which should have only copied changed files) took 3 hours, and I
>> cannot afford to have the db down that long.
>>
>> Anybody with any ideas?
>
> You need not backup the whole database in one go.
>
> You can copy only changed data out of the tables using your knowledge of
> the mail store. That way you'll not need to have such a long running
> backup and it won't be so large either. You can then reassemble the
> pieces later into a new table in case of recovery.
>

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