Re: The danger of deleting backup_label

On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 10:43 AM David Steele <david(at)pgmasters(dot)net> wrote:
> What I meant here (but said badly) is that in the case of snapshot
> backups, the backup_label and tablespace_map will likely need to be
> stored somewhere off the server since they can't be part of the
> snapshot, perhaps in a key store. In that case the backup software would
> still need to read the files from wherever we stored then and correctly
> handle them when storing elsewhere. If you were moving the files to say,
> S3, a similar thing needs to happen. In general, I think a locally
> mounted filesystem is very unlikely to be the final destination for
> these files, and if it is then probably pg_basebackup is your friend.

I mean, writing those tiny little files locally and then uploading
them should be fine in a case like that. It still reduces the surface
for mistakes. And you could also have --backup-label='| whatever' or
something if you wanted. The point is that right now we're asking
people to pull this information out of a query result, and that means
people are trying to do it by calling out to psql, and that is a GREAT
way to screw up the escaping or the newlines or whatever. I don't
think the mistakes people are making here are being made by people
using Perl and DBD::Pg, or Python and psycopg2, or C and libpq.
They're being made by people who are trying to shell script their way
through it, which entails using psql, which makes screwing it up a
breeze.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com