Re: WAL file questions - how to relocate on Windows, how to replay after total loss, etc

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 10:57 AM, John T. Dow <john(at)johntdow(dot)com> wrote:
> BACKGROUND INFO BEGINS
>
> Recently I had some questions about doing backups and received very helpful replies. I have now put together a BAT file to do a routine backup, using pg_dumpall with the -g option to get the roles, and pg_dump with the custom format to get all the data.
>
> I am now testing this process to make sure it is possible to recover data up to the last minute in the event of a catastrophic server failure.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works. You can't
apply saved WAL files to a database restored from a dump. To use
PITR, you need to do a physical backup of the actual database files
(after calling the pg_start_backup() function), then when that is
done, call pg_stop_backup(). You then archive WAL files as the
database runs normally.

To recover, you do a physical restore of the database files, then run
recovery using the archived WAL files.

Read the documentation on PITR again--it's reasonably complete.

-Doug