> for a cold/warm standby postgresql backup, I'd suggest using pitr.
I found that PITR using WAL shipping is not protecting against all
failure scenarios... it sure will help if the primary machine's hardware
fails, but in one case it was useless for us: the primary had a linux
kernel with buggy XFS code (that's what I think it was, cause we never
found out for sure) and we did use XFS for the data partition, and at
one point it started to get corruptions at the data page level. The
corruption was promptly transferred to the standby, and therefore it was
also unusable... we had to recover from a backup, with the related
downtime. Not good for business...
> It's easy to set up and administer. for hot read only backup, bite the
> bullet and use slony.
I think slony would have helped us recovering from the above mentioned
situation earlier and easier, as it transfers logical data and not pages
directly. It has though a bigger overhead than WAL shipping in terms of
administration and performance penalty.
Cheers,
Csaba.