Re: Backup advice

On 08/04/2013 16:14, Johann Spies wrote:
> I would appreciate some advice from the experts on this list about the
> best backup strategy for my database.
>
> The setup:
>
> Size: might be about 200Gb
> The server uses a Tivoli backup client with daily backup
> At the moment There are pg_dumps for each database on the server on a
> daily, weekly and monthly basis. All this gets backed up to the Tivoli
> server.
>
> I would like to reduce the size of the backups as far as possible as we
> have to pay for space on the backup server and I do not want any
> downtime on the database server.
>
> I do not want replication, but want to be able to restore the database
> as recent as possible (at least as it was within the past 24 hours) as
> quickly as possible.
>
> I have read about using pg_basebackup in an article from Shaun Thomas'
> booklet on Packt Publishers**(I will probably buy the booklet)*. *That
> seems to be a possible solution.
>
> I am considering dropping the pg_dumps in favour of the pg_basebackup
> method. Will that be wise?
>
> Regards
> Johann
> --
> Because experiencing your loyal love is better than life itself,
> my lips will praise you. (Psalm 63:3)
>

You should read this:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/continuous-archiving.html

And you have to decide which method fit best. I dropped the dump method
because the dumps size. The weekly basebackup and the WAL archives it's
really smaller in size than dumps. In my case.

But, with PITR, you could restore only the whole cluster...cannot
restore only one database.

And hey ... with PITR, you could restore the cluster to any specified
moment or transaction ... not only to the time of dump or basebackup.

Levi