Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

Greetings,

* Andreas Karlsson (andreas(at)proxel(dot)se) wrote:
> On 11/27/18 4:11 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >>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.
>
> I know that and you know that, but even our own manual use the exclusive
> mode in some of the examples, e.g: "pg_start_backup('label_goes_here')"[1].

Thankfully, that'll get nicely cleaned up by removing the exclusive
backup mode.

> Your point about that people who do not monitor their backups wont notice
> warnings is fair, but even so I think we should give people more time to
> migrate when even our own documentation isn't always clear about the
> exclusive mode being deprecated.

I don't buy off on this argument- we also have things like this:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/backup-file.html

Where we show a simple tar command as a way to backup the database, but
then we caveat it. Similairly, we make it clear that users shouldn't be
using the exclusive mode backups:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/continuous-archiving.html#BACKUP-LOWLEVEL-BASE-BACKUP

If users are only reading the system functions description and thinking
that's enough to figure out how to do backups, and didn't read the
chapters of documentation we have about how to perform a backup, then
chances are very good their existing backup systems are broken, and
that's all the more reason to remove the exclusive mode because at least
then it won't look like things are working when they aren't.

Thanks!

Stephen