Jeff Frost <jeff(at)frostconsultingllc(dot)com> writes:
> I noticed recently that my PITR base backups were occassionally returning
> non-zero, so I turned up the verbosity on rsync and it appears that
> occassionally a file vanishes out from under rsync while it's doing the base
> backup:
> ...
> Would it be ok to just exclude the pg_internal.init file since it disappeared
> during the base backup?
It's safe to exclude those, but those are hardly the only files that
might "disappear" in a live database. It'd be better to use a dump
tool that's less picky about the source data changing under it. We've
had similar reports about GNU tar being too smart for this purpose :-(
regards, tom lane