Re: Backups

Richard Harley wrote:
> Very simple question - does pg_dump/dumpall hit the server in terms
of database performance? We
> currently do nightly backups and I want to move to hourly backups but
not at the expense of hogging
> all the resources for 5 mins.
>
> Pg_dumpall is currently producing a 1GB file - that's the combined
size of around 30 databases and it
> takes around 5 mins to run.

pg_dump will be a performance hit, because it consumes disk I/O
capacity.
You could measure how the system is affected by your current backup.

On the other hand, instead of doing an hourly pg_dump, it might be
preferable to do a filesystem backup and PITR. That way you have to
do a backup only once a day (or week, depends how much traffic you have
and how fast you have to restore) and can still recover to an
arbitrary point in time.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe