Re: Incremental backup with RSYNC or something?

On 11/22/2011 3:28 PM, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:38 AM, Phoenix Kiula<phoenix(dot)kiula(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> I currently have a cronjob to do a full pgdump of the database every
>> day. And then gzip it for saving to my backup drive.
>>
>> However, my db is now 60GB in size, so this daily operation is making
>> less and less sense. (Some of you may think this is foolish to begin
>> with).
>>
>> Question: what can I do to rsync only the new additions in every table
>> starting 00:00:01 until 23:59:59 for each day?
>>
>> Searching google leads to complex things like "incremental WAL" and
>> whatnot, or talks of stuff like pgcluster. I'm hoping there's a more
>> straightforward core solution without additional software or PHD
>> degrees.
> My standard advice to this problem is to do a HS/SR setup which solves
> a number of problems simultaneously. It still makes sence to take a
> full snapshot once in a while though -- but you can take it from the
> standby.
>
> merlin
>

How long is this backup taking? I have a ~100GB database that I back up
with pg_dump (which compresses as it dumps if you want it to) and that
only takes 35 minutes. Granted, I have it on some fast SCSI drives in
RAID 1, but even a single SATA drive should still finish in a decent
amount of time.