This weekend, we're planning to move a production cluster to a new server. Rather than a full dump-and-restore, I want to use a base backup from last night, have the server replay the WAL files up to the time we shutdown the old server, and go from there. Both servers are Windows.
I've never done a recovery from WAL files before, but it sounds simple enough. One thing I'm unsure of though: how can I monitor the progress of the recovery? Will the WAL files themselves change or disappear? Will progress reports end up in the PostgreSQL logs? Something else entirely?