Re: Automated backups for PG running on Windows Server?

Vacuum Joe wrote:
> Quick question: I have installed PG 8.2.x on a customer's system and
> we will be storing a lot of critical data on it. It needs to be
> backed up maybe twice a day. It's very easy to back data up with the
> pgadmin tool (great tool btw) but we need an automated solution that
> we can configure. This is all running on a Windows 2003 server. Any
> suggestions? We're perfectly open to commercial or non-commercial
> solutions.

Use "Scheduled Tasks" to schedule the run of a .BAT file, from which you
run pg_dump.

> Ideally this should be able to do a hot backup, where it gets a valid
> snapshot even as the server is running. I don't know that, in these
> days of super-cheap disks, we need to worry about incremental backup.
> If the entire dataset is 1gb (which it isn't) then a large current
> hard drive can hold a full years worth of dumps, so incremental
> backup doesn't seem relevant.

pg_dump should do that fine. It doesn't do incremental, but it does hot
backup.

> Btw, this pgadmin was pretty cool. I've only ever used PG on Linux
> until now and I had never seen a tool like that. I was impressed
> with how easy it was to install PG, get it running, and then use this
> pgadmin tool to control everything. And I'm a total newbie on
> Windows. This was the first time I have ever looked at Windows 2003
> Server.

pgadmin works fine on Linux as well, you know.. ;-)

//Magnus