Re: using pg_basebackup for point in time recovery

Hi Pierre,

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 12:03:58PM +0000, Pierre Timmermans wrote:
> Here is the doc, the sentence that I find misleading is "There are
> backups that cannot be used for point-in-time recovery", also
> mentioning that they are faster than pg_dumps add to confusion (since
> pg_dumps cannot be used for PITR):
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/continuous-archiving.html

Yes, it is indeed perfectly possible to use such backups to do a PITR
as long as you have a WAL archive able to replay up to the point where
you want the replay to happen, so I agree that this is a bit confusing.
This part of the documentation is here since the beginning of times,
well 6559c4a2 to be exact. Perhaps we would want to reword this
sentence as follows:
"These are backups that could be used for point-in-time recovery if
combined with a WAL archive able to recover up to the wanted recovery
point. These backups are typically much faster to backup and restore
than pg_dump for large deployments but can result as well in larger
backup sizes, so the speed of one method or the other is to evaluate
carefully first."

I am open to better suggestions of course.
--
Michael