so the outfit i'm currently working for on a quasi-full time
basis has what amounts to an OLTP database server in colocation.
the footprint in the rack is very small, that is, there's no
DLT autoloader or anything of that sort in the rack.
the temporary backup solution was to do full dumps in cron
every night and use scp to move them to the office server.
this has clear scaling problems, but was an ok quick
hack back in march.
well, now it's may and the magnitude of the scaling problems
are becoming very obvious. the scp is taking an absurd
amount of time (the backup times themselves aren't all that
bad, but the office is behind a business road runner connection
and the scp is severely bandwidth limited.)
so i'm outlining a longer term solution, and would be
interested in suggestions/comments. part 1 is to reduce the
frequency of the full dumps, and start using a WAL based
incremental solution such as is outlined here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/backup-online.html
part 2 is going to be to set up amanda to roll this stuff to
a DLT drive in the office. i figure that i probably want to do
full backups of the incremental WAL files each time so i'm not
rummaging around the tape library trying to find all of them
should the worst case happen.
but what are the consequences of backing up a WAL file
if the archive process (probably scp in this case) is running
when the backup copy is made? the whole thing won't make it onto
tape, are there any downsides to running a recover with
an incomplete WAL file?
and if there are better solutions, i'm interested in hearing
about them.
thanks,
richard