On 24 February 2016 at 14:23, Scott Whitney <scott@journyx.com> wrote:
Please do not refer me (or the list) to a URL when you are asking for help. Be clear and concise. If you have a URI that helps you, please be specific in the places you do not understand.
Scott,
I've asked for some tips about how could I do incremental backups in Postgres WITHOUT stopping it.
As I haven't had an expected answer, I decided to post here what I've found.
So in the future others with the same question may be helped.
I haven't referred you or the list to a URL********
Lucas
What you originally asked for and what you're referring to in that link are two very different things. An incremental backup using the methods in that link is possible without any third-party tools (look into pg_basebackup & pg_receivexlogs which both come with 9.2+), it's just that the third party tools can possibly make it slightly easier and provide some additional options
However, once you restore that backup and bring it up as a standalone database instance, you can no longer use the WAL stream from the original instance to "replay" those changes. This is also the case with any sort of rsync'ing of the data files from one instance to another.
You may be better off looking into a logical replication solution to copy your data to a testing system if it needs to be a standalone system. That is not currently built into Postgres, but it's on track for possible inclusion with 9.6. In the mean time look into tools such as Mimeo or Bucardo.