Re: WAL Archiving and base backup

On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 11:31 AM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> * Issa Gorissen (issa-gorissen(at)usa(dot)net) wrote:
> > Thx a lot. I thought about it but was not so sure about having a complex
> > script (compared to the very simple version when using the exclusive
> backup
> > - but this this is deprecated...).
> >
> > I will test your option with the simpler version and post it back to it
> can
> > maybe land in PostgreSQL documentation.
>
> The PG docs show how the command works and that's it. The commands
> in the docs aren't intended to be actually used in production
> environments. Writing a full solution involves having a good
> understanding of the PG code and how WAL archiving, backups, et al, are
> done.
>

For all my suggestions of "use third-party where possible" I do think that
we should have, probably as part of pg_basebackup, a mode that performs a
filesystem copy of WAL to an archive location and verifies that the archive
is valid otherwise it write to the PostgreSQL log that there was a
problem. pg_basebackup should either be able to install that command (with
maybe some CLI prompts for settings or something) using ALTER SYSTEM. Our
documentation can then demonstrate the example usage of the archive_command
parameters as being a generic form of that command.

i.e., pg_backbackup --wal-archive-location /path/to/dir/ --wal_to_archive $1

David J.