HI John, all of the backups we have taken were from the 24/7 uptime operational production servers. The 4-5 days duration is taken from these backups. Several months ago we restored one of these backups to another higher capacity database server on fiber channel storage in a different location, then we upgraded postgis from 1.5.8 to 2.1.1 and PostgreSQL from 9.1.6 to 9.3.3, that restore took 9-10 days to finish. We have another VM that has been set aside to be stood up asap as our standby server to this primary. Currently, this standby VM only has Linux 6.4 installed, no PostgreSQL or PostGIS. I was thinking if we can perform a VM clone, we wouldn't have to install PostgreSQL, Postgis, packages, etc., on the standby server.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [BUGS] Configuring Standby Server in PostgreSQL 9.3.3
From: John R Pierce <pierce@hogranch.com>
Date: Wed, April 02, 2014 1:46 pm
To: fburgess@radiantblue.com, pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org

On 4/2/2014 11:07 AM, fburgess@radiantblue.com wrote:
We want to do this because our database is 7TB and takes 4-5 to backup and 8-9 days to restore to the standby server.



that might be true for pg_dump/pg_restore type backups, but the initial copy made for streaming replication is a file system copy/clone.

how long does pg_basebackup  take with your system operational?

-- 
john r pierce                                      37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast