Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 09:45:04AM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> If you don't consider your recovery scripts and your backup scripts to
> be related then I've really got to wonder how you're regularly testing
> your backups to make sure that they're actually valid.

Base backups can be perfectly self-contained as long as they include all
the WAL segments needed to recover up to the end-of-backup record.
That's what pg_basebackup does with its default options
(--wal-method=stream in particular).

> If you aren't regularly testing your backups then I've got little
> sympathy.

Fortunately they do, hundreds of time on a daily basis ;)

> To be clear, pgbackrest doesn't have any dependency here- but it, like
> all of the other 3rd party backup solutions and any restore solution
> that a user has come up with, are going to have to be changed to deal
> with the changes in how recovery works, so this is a good time to make
> these changes.

My point is that base backups do not have a mandatory dependency with
recovery.conf all the time as they can perfectly be restored if they are
standalone backups. I can see a dependency with recovery.conf once you
have a base backup which needs to be fed with WAL segments from an
external archive, or when using a base backup to create a standby.
--
Michael