Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

Greetings,

* Andreas Karlsson (andreas(at)proxel(dot)se) wrote:
> On 11/27/18 3:46 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >I'm concerned, seriously, that people don't have anywhere near the
> >concern about the recovery side of things as they do about the backup
> >side of things and that's really concerning.
>
> I agree with your larger point, but in this case the two breakages do not
> seem equal. As far as I gather the removal of recovery.conf will in practice
> result in a longer downtime when your recovery scripts breaks but not any
> data loss. While if we remove the exclusive backup mode then some people's
> backup scripts will break and if they do not properly monitor their backups
> they risk data loss.

Let's please try to remember that this is across a major version upgrade
and is removing a broken capability that's already been deprecated for a
couple years.

If they aren't monitoring their backup scripts today, and aren't
regularly performing restores of those backups, they're already risking
data loss.

> I think we should use more caution when data loss is at stake rather than
> "just" downtime. So personally I am in favor of updating the manual with
> warnings (right now it does not even say if exclusive or non-exclusive is
> the default) and adding a deprecation warning when people use the exclusive
> mode.

Waiting isn't going to change any of these factors, nor will throwing
warnings about the exclusive mode if people aren't monitoring their
scripts.

If we really want to keep the exclusive backup mode around, then, as
Magnus said on a nearby thread, it needs to be fixed. If it's fixed and
just works and everyone's scripts work, then great, then we can
un-deprecate it and move on.

If we aren't going to fix it then let's remove it.

Thanks!

Stephen