Re: Hot standby server does not start

The procedure for making a base backup is relatively simple:

1. Ensure that WAL archiving is enabled and working.

2. Connect to the database as a superuser, and issue the command

   SELECT pg_start_backup('label');

   where label is any string you want to use to uniquely identify this backup operation. (One good practice is to use the full path where you intend to put the backup dump file.) pg_start_backup creates a backup label file, called backup_label, in the cluster directory with information about your backup.

   It does not matter which database within the cluster you connect to to issue this command. You can ignore the result returned by the function; but if it reports an error, deal with that before proceeding.

3. Perform the backup, using any convenient file-system-backup tool such as tar or cpio. It is neither necessary nor desirable to stop normal operation of the database while you do this.

4. Again connect to the database as a superuser, and issue the command

   SELECT pg_stop_backup();

   This should return successfully.

5. Once the WAL segment files used during the backup are archived as part of normal database activity, you are done.