I need to back up our database off-site for disaster recovery. If I just back up the entire database data directory (i.e. /var/lib/pgsql/data) will I be able to restore from there? Or should I instead just dump the data, using pg_dump, and back up the dump?
The advantage of the first method would be that I would not have to wait for pg_dump (it takes quite long on our 60G+ database) and would just be able to configure the backup agent to monitor the data directory and do differential backups of the files there every hour or so.
Your suggestions are much appreciated!
-Gabor