Re: Inherited an 18TB DB & need to backup

Thanks Rory, the machine has the capacity to pull through pg_dumps but like
u rightly mentioned incremental backups mean that we will need to work with
the wal's.. 18TB is what is the scary part and with compression I dont see
it being less than 2TB a day...

On Fri, 15 May 2020, 17:02 Rory Campbell-Lange, <rory(at)campbell-lange(dot)net>
wrote:

> On 15/05/20, Suhail Bamzena (suhailsalem(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> > Hello All,
> > I have very recently inherited an 18 TB DB that is running version 9.2.
> > Apparently this database has never been backed up and I have been tasked
> to
> > set in a periodic backup routine (weekly full & daily incremental) and
> dump
> > it into a NAS. What is the best way to go about this? Did some reading
> and
> > hear that pgbackrest does a good job with such huge sizes. Your expert
> > advise is needed.
>
> Incremental backups suggest the need to backup WAL archives. See
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/continuous-archiving.html
>
> pgbackrest looks very cool but we haven't used it.
>
> A very simple solution could be just to dump the database daily with
> pg_dump, if you have the space and machine capacity to do it. Depending
> on what you are storing, you can achieve good compression with this, and
> it is a great way of having a simple file from which to restore a
> database.
>
> Our ~200GB cluster resolves to under 10GB of pg_dump files, although
> 18TB is a whole different order of size.
>
> Rory
>