Hello all,
I have a system that was originally set up on 9.3, a few years ago moved to 11.2
A shared mount is used to host the basebackup and wal archives.
The failover procedure was basically manual and as follow:
1/ Take out the primary, remove the IP from the primary machine/VM
2/ Create the trigger_file on the standby, add the IP to the new primary machine/VM
3/ Create a basebackup from the new primary
4/ Redeploy the new standby, which will unpack this basebackup from step 3
5/ The new standby will have a restore_command to get synced back up.
I see there's more recent tools like pg_rewind these days. Haven't had time to check that out and probably won't for a while.
My question is: is the basebackup actually necessary? Can I not simply modify the configuration old the old primary, set it up like a standby, and then start the process/container, and have it pick up the necessary wal_archives with the restore_command?
Or is it more complicated than that? Something like a timeline jump or something else that makes it impossible to simply set the old primary to standby and start it again?
Kind regards,
Koen De Groote