Re: Backup done by newbie

pg_dumpall >outfile and then backup the outfile. dumping on my p3-500 with over 1
gig of data takes a minimal amount of time (5-10 minutes) as of my last check. I
backup the file to tape using tar cvfy /dev/st0 /usr/local/pgsql/outfile or the
equiv. I have had very good experiences with this. Another way is to write a
script to pull the dbnames and back up each one individually.

Gavin

Gunnar Lindholm wrote:

> Hello.
> I wonder if there is anyone who has administrated a "real" database that could
> tell me something about backup of the database, what tools to use, how to
> acctually do the backup, what backup hardware to use, and so on.
>
> The reason for asking this is that I might have to do a backup on a database
> soon, and the only idea I have right now is to dump the database and make a tar
> backup of the dumped data.
>
> The database is not that big, It's about 500k lines in the dump, that's
> about <20MB of data I guess. (The real problem here is probably that it's
> running on a totaly undocumented informix database from the 80's. I'll try to
> switch to postgres some day...)
>
> So, how would you guys do it? I'm quite interested in how you do it on a big
> database. I mean, just to dump this database took me more than 2 hours, (the
> hardware is a x86 running at 300MHz with 64MB Ram and IDE discs, so it would
> probably go alot faster with some "real" hardware), but what should I do when I
> get 20/2*24*7=1,7 GB of data (not to unrealistic though), i.e. it would take a
> week just to dump the database? Could it be possible to just make a snapshot of
> the database on weekends and during the weeks, just doing "incremental backup"
> i.e. log the transactions?
>
> I would be very happy if you would like share your experience.
> Gunnar.