Cott Lang <cott@internetstaff.com> writes:
> 2. The rest was my hypothesizing on what might be necessary for
> point-in-time recovery, which pg_dump isn't going to allow even if you
> can perform incremental dumps.
Right. There seems to be some confusion about that in this thread,
so just for the record: pg_dump has nothing to do with our plans for
point-in-time recovery (or incremental backup, which is essentially the
same thing). To do these, you would take a *physical* dump of the
database directory as a baseline, and thereafter copy WAL segments off
to tape or whatever you are using as archive media. Recovery would
consist of restoring the physical baseline dump, and then replaying WAL
against it up to whatever point in time you wanted to recover to. You
would, therefore, need to keep a continuous sequence of WAL files back
to the time of your most recent baseline backup.
regards, tom lane