Re: Netapp SnapCenter

So apologies if this is a stupid question but there's obviously been a lot of discussion on this issue. Was a consensus ever reached on the following?

If a Postgres database (both data and WAL) is located on one NetApp volume, meaning a snapshot should capture everything at exactly the same time with the required atomicity, do we still need to put the database into backup mode beforehand (and take it out afterwards)? If we don't put Postgres into backup mode first, will we still be able to use the WALs to roll transactions forward or would we be limited to only the point-in-time at which that snapshot was taken?

Thanks much.

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net>
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2020 7:06 AM
To: Paul Förster <paul(dot)foerster(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>; Wolff, Ken L (US) <ken(dot)l(dot)wolff(at)lmco(dot)com>; pgsql-general <pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: EXTERNAL: Re: Netapp SnapCenter

Greetings,

* Paul Förster (paul(dot)foerster(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> > On 22. Jun, 2020, at 13:08, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> > It does not work off *that* base backup. But if you start from the *prior* be backup (one that did complete with a successful pg_stop_backup) then you can still use the archived wal to recover to any point in time.
>
> ok, that's clear now. Thank you very much.

Right, and tools like pgbackrest will figure this kind of thing out for you too- just give it the time you want to restore to and it'll figure out the right backup to use.

Thanks,

Stephen