Re: Standby servers and incrementally updated backups

On Jun 25, 2007, at 4:40 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 16:00 -0500, Erik Jones wrote:
>> On Jun 25, 2007, at 3:40 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:
>>>> If I'm correct, then for large databases wherein it can
>>>> take hours to take a base backup, is there anything to be gained by
>>>> using incrementally updated backups?
>>>
>>> If you are certain there are parts of the database not touched at
>>> all
>>> between backups. The only real way to be sure is to take file level
>>> checksums, or you can trust file dates. Many backup solutions can do
>>> this for you.
>>
>> Wait, um, what? I'm still not clear on why you would want to run a
>> backup of an already caught up standby server.
>
> Sorry, misread your question.
>
> While you are running a warm standby config, you will still want to
> take
> regular backups for recoverability and DR. These are additional
> backups,
> i.e they are not required to maintain the warm standby.
>
> You can backup the Primary, or you can backup the Standby, so most
> people will choose to backup the Standby to reduce the overhead on the
> Primary.

Ok, yeah, that's what I was thinking and is where we are headed in
the next month or so here at work: we already have a standby running
and will be adding a second standby server that we will be using for
snapshot backups (packaged with the pertinent wal files...) as well
as periodically bringing the second standby up to run dumps from just
to cover all of our bases and also to be able to take our main
primary server down for maintenance and still have both a production
and standby running. I guess I was really just wanting to make sure
I wasn't missing some other big usage for incremental backups from
the standby.

Erik Jones

Software Developer | Emma®
erik(at)myemma(dot)com
800.595.4401 or 615.292.5888
615.292.0777 (fax)

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