Re: incremental backups

Rick Gigger <rick@alpinenetworking.com> writes:
> That's what I mean by invalid.  Let's say I do something stupid and
> do a physical backup and I don't grab the current WAL file.  All I
> have is the last one to be archived before I did my backup, which is
> not late enough to do a valid restore.  Will postgres know that the
> restore process failed because I didn't have that last necessary WAL
> file or will it just start up in a potentially inconsistent state.

Yes:

    /*
     * Complain if we did not roll forward far enough to render the backup
     * dump consistent.
     */
    if (XLByteLT(EndOfLog, recoveryMinXlogOffset))
    {
        if (needNewTimeLine)    /* stopped because of stop request */
            ereport(FATAL,
                    (errmsg("requested recovery stop point is before end time of backup dump")));
        else
            /* ran off end of WAL */
            ereport(FATAL,
                    (errmsg("WAL ends before end time of backup dump")));
    }

            regards, tom lane