Tom Davies <tgdavies@gmail.com> writes:
> 1. Purely out of curiousity, what's the nnnnnnnn.history file which is
> requested from the archive when you restore?
Read the doc section about timelines --- if a history file exists,
it's needed to allow proper tracing of the "timeline" through multiple
recovery attempts.
> 3. What's the best thing to do when I deliberately shut down
> PostgreSQL (i.e. pg_ctl stop)? When I start again I will be restoring
> from the most recent backup and rolling forward over the archived WAL
> files. I believe that shutdown leaves me with unarchived WAL files in
> pg_xlog.
Yeah, you should archive the latest WAL file, but in 8.0 you'd have to
do that manually. (IIRC there isn't even a forced-xlog-switch function
in that version to help you.)
> 4. I'm using PostgreSQL 8.0 -- are there any significant improvements
> in on-line backups in later versions?
Get thyself onto 8.2 ASAP, or maybe go to 8.3 shortly after the
holidays. 8.0 is basically our stone age for PITR support; while
the concepts haven't changed since then, we've filed off a whole lot
of rough edges in operational details. In a situation where you're
depending on archive recovery as much as this, you *need* those fixes.
regards, tom lane