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 <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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