Re: Deleting old WAL-files

Gustav Karlsson wrote:
> I am looking for a good method of determining what WAL-segments can be deleted from our backup-
> archive.
> 
> We are using Postgresql 9.3 and do nightly basebackups along with archiving of WAL-segments.
> 
> We would like to prevent our backup-archive from growing forever, and thus delete basebackups and WAL-
> segments older than say 1 year.
> 
> Is there a good way of finding the oldest WAL-segment needed for a given basebackup? (If not, what is
> the typical method for deleting old WAL-segments?)

The backup contains a file "backup_label" which contains a line like

START WAL LOCATION: 0/83000028 (file 000000010000000000000083)

That is the oldest file needed for recovery.

But a simple solution would be to keep WAL archives for one day more than your oldest
base backup, that way you can never miss a WAL archive that you need.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe