Simple, safe hot backup and recovery

Hi, all

I want to achieve a simple, safe hot backup and recovery using PostgreSQL 8.3
or later.

The standalone hot backup script listed in "24.3.5.1. Standalone hot backups"
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/continuous-archiving.html)
seems to very helpful for me because it's simple and it matches my needs.
I don't need the timeline feature provided by PITR. However, the recovery
procedure is somewhat complex, as the documentation shows. So, I want to
rely on the PostgreSQL's crush recovery mechanism. Is this a bad idea?

I wrote a prototype script for that reason. The script's first part is based
on the standalone hot backup script taken from the documentation. The last part
is my idea. The archived WAL segment files are stored into the backup's pg_xlog/
and remake the backup file. The script works for me, but I want to know whether
this approach is really safe or not. If it's not safe, I want to know
the reason.

Anybody has good idea? Is there another solution?

Thanks in advance,
--
Yoshinori Sano <yoshinori(dot)sano(at)gmail(dot)com>