Greg Stark said:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
>
>> I noticed that we are using the term "Online Backup" in our
>> documentation when we are talking about continuous backup and PITR.
>>
>> To me, "online backup" is doing a backup while the system is online
>> (online-backup), and that is accomplished by pg_dump.
>
> Well fwiw what pg_dump does isn't even considered a "backup" at all in
> other systems. It's a "logical export" or something of that sort.
>
> It's not considered a "backup" because it's saving something different
> than the actual physical database. When you restore you get something
> (hopefully) logically equivalent but still physically different.
This seems fairly arbitrary. On that basis anything on a higher level than
dd is not a backup method, ISTM.
cheers
andrew