Re: Standby Server and Barman Backup on production system

Hello Sebastian:

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Sebastian Fiedler - Nexst4 GmbH
<sebastian(dot)fiedler(at)nexst4(dot)de> wrote:
> I use one Postgres Server as Master an an other one as Standby (WAL
> archives).
> I do also a daily backup of the Master Server using pg_dump.
> Now there is a situation where a possible restore via "cat dumpfile |
> psql ...." takes to long and the server load is too high.

Aside from the barman stuff. We have a similar setup ( master + hot
standby plus dumps ). The time to restore the dumps is only taken when
you have a real disaster ( if the master fails you use the standby,
not restore the master ) ( Also, if some of the users deletes *, I
consider it a real disaster ) so it is not that critical. Also, we've
observed text backups are worse than custom format backups, as they
force a full restore on you ( we do a coupe of trick which schemas and
partitions which allows us to restore the main tables, go back online,
and backfill the historics once app is running ). And also, do you
have a custom config for restore? For disaster recovery, as the db
cannot be used while it is in progress, we stop, change the conf to a
tuned one ( things like fsync=off, wal_level=minimal, lots of
checkpoint segments, archive mode off, full page writes off ), restore
( which goes much, much faster ), and restart with the production
conf.

Regards.
Francisco Olarte.