Re: Combined PITR/pg_dump backups?

Brian Hurt  writes:
> The question I have is: can I do both?  Not as in "backing up the 
> database twice", but as a combined process.  What I'm thinking of is the 
> following process:
>     - I do normal WAL loging as in PITR.
>     - When I want to start a backup, I do a pg_start_backup(...), like PITR.
>     - Instead of taring up the files on the filesystem, I instead do a 
> pg_dump
>     - When the pg_dump completes, I do a pg_end_backup(), like PITR.

No, this will *not* work.  You need an exact file-level image of the
database in order to do PITR restore against, and a pg_dump dump cannot
recreate that.

			regards, tom lane