Re: Cold backup with rsync -- WAL files?

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Scott Whitney <scott(at)journyx(dot)com> wrote:

> Why not use cascading replication for this? That's precisely what I'm
> doing.
>

rsync is much simpler, and has one huge advantage: you can fire up the
backup and see if it works, and when you're done you don't have to take
another base backup. Just run rsync again and you're back in sync.

Back to my original question...

Craig

> ------------------------------
>
> We need a "last chance" offsite backup of our backup server. Since the
> backup server isn't accessed by customers, we have the luxury of being able
> to shut it off briefly once per day. Call server "A" the backup, server "B"
> is offsite backup-of-backup: The procedure I'd like to implement is:
>
> server B is always "cold" (Postgres not running)
> while A is running, rsync A --> B
> stop Postgres on A
> rsync A --> B
> restart Postgres on A
>
> My question is: what about the WAL files? Do I need to rsync them from A
> to B too, or can/should I just clean out B's WAL directory, or something
> else?
>
> Thanks,
> Craig
>
>
>