Re: dealing with file size when archiving databases

On Monday 20 June 2005 09:53 pm, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Andrew L. Gould" <algould(at)datawok(dot)com> writes:
> > I've been backing up my databases by piping pg_dump into gzip and
> > burning the resulting files to a DVD-R. Unfortunately, FreeBSD has
> > problems dealing with very large files (>1GB?) on DVD media. One
> > of my compressed database backups is greater than 1GB; and the
> > results of a gzipped pg_dumpall is approximately 3.5GB. The
> > processes for creating the iso image and burning the image to DVD-R
> > finish without any problems; but the resulting file is
> > unreadable/unusable.
>
> Yech. However, I think you are reinventing the wheel in your
> proposed solution. Why not just use split(1) to divide the output of
> pg_dump or pg_dumpall into slices that the DVD software won't choke
> on? See notes at
> http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/backup.html#BACKUP-DUMP
>-LARGE
>
> regards, tom lane

Thanks, Tom! The split option also fixes the problem; whereas my
"solution", only delays the problem until a table gets too large. Of
course, at that point, I should probably use something other than
DVD's.

Andrew Gould