Re: dealing with file size when archiving databases

On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 09:28:51PM -0500, Andrew L. Gould wrote:
> 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.

Tom's response is certainly something to consider; also, note that if
you "pg_dump -t" each table separately, the dumps are not necessarily
consistent with one another, meaning that you could end up with an
unrecoverable backup if a transaction modifying two (foreign key-)
dependant tables happens to run after backing up one but before backing
up the other.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]surnet.cl>)
"Las cosas son buenas o malas segun las hace nuestra opinión" (Lisias)