On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Payal Singh <payal@omniti.com> wrote:
Not sure how/why you didn't get my reply:
If your offsite backup server has enough space to accommodate all backups that your retention period requires, backing up WAL archives is always a good idea as it could not only help you restore the standalone database, but also allow you to set up a slave if need be.
Another way to think about it would be a backup without WAL files would be ideally just a base backup, while the one with WAL files will give you point in time recovery. It all depends on what you want your backups to be used for.
Thanks, I did get your reply, but it didn't answer my question. I don't want anything but a single point-in-time snapshot of a stopped database. (I have good reasons for this decision.)
After I rsync the postgres data directory, do I need the WAL files from the source (they're on a separate disk, not part of the postgres data directory)? Can/should I erase the WAL directory of the destination?
Thanks, Craig
Payal Singh, OmniTi Computer Consulting Inc. Junior Database Architect, Phone: 240.646.0770 x 253
While I appreciate suggestions of other ways to do replication, does anyone have an answer to my original question?
...The procedure I'd like to implement is:
server B is always "cold" (Postgres not running)
while A is running, rsync A --> B
stop Postgres on A
rsync A --> B
restart Postgres on A
My question is: what about the WAL files? Do I need to rsync them from A to B too, or can/should I just clean out B's WAL directory, or something else?