Re: PgBackRest full backup first time : Verification

>
> database size: 146.9GB, database backup size: 146.9GB
> repo1: backup size: 20.6GB

It looks to me as though everything is working as expected. You took a full
backup of your system, which was around 147GB - most of which is in a
tablespace. It got compressed down to 20GB. You then took two incremental
backups, which are by definition much smaller and take a short amount of
time to run.

I can't restore back to the DB server right now to test it as it is a
> production server and down time granting is not immediately possible to
> test it ...
>

You do not have to restore to the same server or the same directory. You
can keep your production system running and do a test restore somewhere
else. Just make sure you specify --archive-mode=off (which prevents the WAL
from being shipped from the restored system to your existing production
repo)

[root(at)db1 data]# du -h
> returns 537 G
>

This is not relevant, as pgbackrest only cares about the Postgres data
directory (/data/edb/as16/data/)

149G /data/edb/as16/tablespace/ESS

This is where the rest of your backup size is coming from. Postgres and
pgbackrest consider this part of the data directory.

You really should spin up a test Postgres cluster and get very familiar
with how pgbackrest works, rather than continuing to flounder about on a
production system and rely on mailing lists to answer a bunch of questions
for you. While we can answer these questions, you will learn better from
experimenting and trying things out yourself on a non-prod system.

Cheers,
Greg