Re: Planning hot/live backups?

"Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net> writes:
> Steve Poe wrote:
>> The owners of the animal hospital where I work at want to consider live/hot
>> backups through out the day so we're less likely to lose a whole
>> day of transaction.  We use Postgresql 8.0.15. We do 3AM
>> backups, using pg_dumpall, to a file when there is very little activity.

> You probably want to look into PITR, you can have a constant ongoing
> backup of your data and never lose more than a few minutes of data.  The
> overhead isn't all the big especially if you are shipping the log files
> to a separate server.

But note that you really need to update to a newer major release before
depending on PITR.  While 8.0 nominally has support for it, it's taken
us several releases to really get the operational gotchas sorted out.

            regards, tom lane