Re: Are file system level differential/incremental backups possible?

As there's one file for each object, a single update on each would make you
to copy the all the file again. I heard there was tool to make differentiel
copy of a part of a file but I don't know if it's really efficient.

Anyway, a better way for you would be to do a regular backup (with
pg_start_backup, copy and pg_stop_backup) and then use wal archive_command
to keep the xlogs between 2 full backups.

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 11:30 PM, Bob Hatfield <bobhatfield(at)gmail(dot)com>wrote:

> Is it possible to do a full file system level backup of the data
> directory, say once a week, and differentials or incrementals daily?
>
> I'm wondering if there are files that would normally be removed that a
> restore: Full then diff/inc would not remove and perhaps
> corrupt/confuse things.
>
> Process:
> Saturday: Full backup (reset archive bits) of data dir with database
> shutdown
> Sunday: Differential (don't reset archive bits) of data dir with
> database shutdown
> Monday: Differential (don't reset archive bits) of data dir with
> database shutdown
> Wednesday: Restore to test server using Saturday's Full and Monday's
> Differential.
>
> Obviously this works for regular files/file systems; however, I'm not
> sure this is a good method with postgresql as the resulting data dir
> *may* (?) contain extra files (or other issues)?
>
> Note: our database is 850GB (Windows 2008 R2 pg version 8.3.12)
>
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