Re: block-level incremental backup

On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 1:10 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> I disagree with this on a couple of levels.  The first is pretty simple-
> we don't have all of the information.  The user may have some reason to
> believe that timestamp-based is a bad idea, for example, and therefore
> having an option to perform a checksum-based backup makes sense.  rsync
> is a pretty good tool in my view and it has a very similar option-
> because there are trade-offs to be made.  LSN is great, if you don't
> mind reading every file of your database start-to-finish every time, but
> in a running system which hasn't suffered from clock skew or other odd
> issues (some of which we can also detect), it's pretty painful to scan
> absolutely everything like that for an incremental.

There's a separate thread on using WAL-scanning to avoid having to
scan all the data every time. I pointed it out to you early in this
thread, too.

> If you track the checksum of the file in the manifest then it's a pretty
> strong validation that the backup repo hasn't been corrupted between the
> backup and the restore.  Of course, the database could have been
> corrupted at the source, and perhaps that's what you were getting at
> with your 'limited extent' but that isn't what I was referring to.

Yeah, that all seems fair. Without the checksum, you can only validate
that you have the right files and that they are the right sizes, which
is not bad, but the checksums certainly make it stronger. But,
wouldn't having to checksum all of the files add significantly to the
cost of taking the backup? If so, I can imagine that some people might
want to pay that cost but others might not. If it's basically free to
checksum the data while we have it in memory anyway, then I guess
there's little to be lost.

> I'm pretty baffled by this argument, particularly in this context.  We
> already have tooling around trying to manage WAL archives in core- see
> pg_archivecleanup.  Further, we're talking about pg_basebackup here, not
> about Netbackup or Tivoli, and the results of a pg_basebackup (that is,
> a set of tar files, or a data directory) could happily be backed up
> using whatever Enterprise tool folks want to use- in much the same way
> that a pgbackrest repo is also able to be backed up using whatever
> Enterprise tools someone wishes to use.  We designed it quite carefully
> to work with exactly that use-case, so the distinction here is quite
> lost on me.  Perhaps you could clarify what use-case these changes to
> pg_basebackup solve, when working with a Netbackup or Tivoli system,
> that pgbackrest doesn't, since you bring it up here?

I'm not an expert on any of those systems, but I doubt that
everybody's OK with backing everything up to a pgbackrest repository
and then separately backing up that repository to some other system.
That sounds like a pretty large storage cost.

> As for if we should be sending more to the server, or asking the server
> to send more to us, I don't really have a good feel for what's "best".
> At least one implementation I'm familiar with builds a manifest on the
> PG server side and then compares the results of that to the manifest
> stored with the backup (where that comparison is actually done is on
> whatever system the "backup" was started from, typically a backup
> server).  Perhaps there's an argument for sending the manifest from the
> backup repository to PostgreSQL for it to then compare against the data
> directory but I'm not really sure how it could possibly do that more
> efficiently and that's moving work to the PG server that it doesn't
> really need to do.

I agree with all that, but... if the server builds a manifest on the
PG server that is to be compared with the backup's manifest, the one
the PG server builds can't really include checksums, I think. To get
the checksums, it would have to read the entire cluster while building
the manifest, which sounds insane. Presumably it would have to build a
checksum-free version of the manifest, and then the client could
checksum the files as they're streamed down and write out a revised
manifest that adds the checksums.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company