Re: Backup Policy & Disk Space Issues

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 10:07:21AM +0200, Volkan YAZICI wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In the company, we're facing with serious disk space problems which
> is not caused by PostgreSQL, but the nature of our data. Database
> sizes are around 200-300GB, which is relatively not that much, but
> databases require strict backup policies:
>
> - Incremental backup for each day. (250GB)

What exactly does this mean in the context of PostgreSQL? We don't,
as far as I've been able to determine, support this in either the
community branch or even in any proprietary one.

> - Full backup for each week of the last month. (4 x 250GB)
> - Full backup for each month of the last year. (12 x 250GB)
>
> As a result, we require a space of size (roughly)
>
> 250 + 4x250 + 12x250 = 17x250 = 4250GB = 4.15TB
>
> for each server per year. Considering we have ~15 servers,
>
> 15x4250 = 63750 = 62.25TB

SATA disk space is quite cheap these days, so unless something is very
badly wrong with your funding model, this is not really a problem.

Here's one outfit that will build and configure storage hardware for
you:

http://www.capricorn-tech.com/

Cheers,
David.

> as can be seen, growth of the backed up data sizes have almost no
> relations with the actual data sizes. At the moment, we're using tape
> drive cartridges for weekly and monthly backups. But the incremental
> backups, plus the database itself requires a constant space of size
> ~500GB.
>
> To summarize, as a DBA most of my time is wasting with validating if the
> backup policies performed right, cartridges captioned correctly, etc.
> What are your experiences with similar sizes of data? How do you cope
> with backups? Do you recommend any other hardware/software solutions?

>
>
> Regards.
>
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