Hi,
Version 9.4...
Per the PG docs, to facilitate continuous WAL archiving and PITR recovery...
"To enable WAL archiving, set the wal_level configuration parameter to archive (or hot_standby), archive_mode to on, and specify the shell command to use in the archive_command configuration parameter."
This instruction is fine and I have a solid understanding of the implementation of these parameters, what they do and the why behind them, i.e. in order to maintain a continuous chain of database changes in the WAL stream.
My question however is this...
A colleague recently suggested that instead of implementing an 'archive_command' to push archivable WALs to a secondary location (for further backup to tape for example), we could instead persist the WAL files in their current location by setting the "wal_keep_segments" parameter to an extreme value e.g. 1000 and have the 'archive_command' do nothing.
So, something like...
wal_keep_segments=1000
archive_command='cd .'
And then periodically copy the archived WAL_files from the pg_xlog directory out to tape, removing as we go?
Is this approach feasible? Assuming obviously, we have sufficient disk space to facilitate 1000 WAL files etc.
But from a point-in-time recovery, and backup perspective - are we missing anything if we were to adopt this non-standard approach?
Regards