Re: Remove Deprecated Exclusive Backup Mode

Greetings,

* Peter Eisentraut (peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> Clearly, not having to do that at all is better, but if this is all
> there is to it, then I'm confused by the characterizations of how awful
> and terrible this feature is and how we must rush to remove it.

It's not all there is to it though.

This issue leads to extended downtime regularly and is definitely a huge
'gotcha' for users, even if you don't want to call it outright broken,
but the other issue is that our documentation is ridiculously
complicated around how to do a backup properly because of this and that
also leads to the reality that it's difficult to make improvements to it
because every sentence has to consider both methods, and that's really
assuming that users actively read through the detailed documentation
instead of just looking at those nice simple 'pg_start_backup' and
'pg_stop_backup' methods and use them thinking that's all that's
required.

We see this *all* the time, on the lists, in blog posts (even those from
somewhat reputable companies...), and in other places. The exclusive
backup method is a huge foot-gun for new users to PostgreSQL and leads
to downtime, corrupt backups, and then corrupt databases when backups
get restored.

It really does need to go, and the sooner, the better.

Thanks,

Stephen