backup, roll forward recovery and log archiving

Hi, there:

I am a new user of PostgreSQL. I am trying find out whether I can do, and if
so, how to do a roll forward recovery from a backup. It seems that the 7.3
release does not provide mechanisms to perform a hot backup, to archive
logs, and to apply the archived logs for a recovery. I saw a patch(pg_copy)
for roll forward recovery in a post from richt(at)multera(dot)com, I don't know
whether this is implemented yet. So if I perform nightly export with
pg_dump, and there is a datafile corruption in the afternoon, then my only
choice would be to restore from the dump, and lose all the transactions
between the dump and the point of failure. Am I right? I'd really appreciate
it if anyone can provide some inside into this issue. Thanks a million.

Yuting Wang
ServerVault Co.