need a hand with my backup strategy please...

Morning

I made the mistake of thinking that I could recover to any point in time with a logical backup plus WAL files, unfortunately that is not the case. I was rsync'ing wal files to another system, and set the archive timeout to 5 mins, and the retention to allow for 25 hours worth or so. Unfortunately though if there is heavy load, the wal files will be generated more regularly than the 5 minute max.

So I'm back to the drawing board for both reasons above.

I've set up pgbarman (seems to be an excellent project - thank you).

My question is how often the base backup should be done. Is it reasonable to specify:

minimum_redundancy = 1
retention_policy = RECOVERY WINDOW OF 1 DAY

and then set up cron to do a base backup every day? I guess also it could be done once a week with a longer retention policy, at the expense of more disk space for wal files.

And then run the "barman cron" immediately after which will take care of deleting redundant backups? In fact it doesn't seem to so not sure how to handle that.

I think I will stick with the nightly backups using pg_dump of the individual databases, as this is useful for refreshing UAT from production and other tasks.

But does this sound like a reasonable strategy for handling PITR? I have read everything I can about this but haven't found a canonical suggestion for implementing.

Bonus question is, the barman cron seems to actually apply the incoming wal segments to the base backup. If it does do this, how is it possible to restore to a point in time?

Thanks for any help.

Cheers, jamie

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