Re: Incremental Backup

Mladen Gogala wrote:
> Craig Barnes wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Wouldn?t incremental backup be achieved by archiving the WAL files?
> >
> > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/continuous-archiving.html
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Craig
> 
> That depends on how do you define an incremental backup.  Being a former 
> system administrator,  my definition of an incremental backup is a 
> backup that only backs up files changed since the last backup. You will 
> find that to be  the most frequent definition of the phrase "incremental 
> backup". In addition to that, it would be highly impractical to make a 
> single hot backup and than have a gazillion archives to recover. What 
> you're talking about is called hot backup and point in time recovery, 
> but not an incremental backup.

Agreed.  Incremental backups are implemented by pg-rman:

	http://code.google.com/p/pg-rman/

> For what is worth, I find incremental backups impractical. With an 
> incremental backup, one also has to restore the full backup and all 
> incremental backups after it, which sort of misses the point.  I do a 
> full on-line (hot) backup weekly and a  daily archive backup.

Also agreed.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian          http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

  + It's impossible for everything to be true. +