Re: Backup "Best Practices"

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 2:50 PM, Israel Brewster <israel(at)ravnalaska(dot)net>
wrote:

>
> - What is the "best" (or just a good) method of keeping the WAL archives
>> under control? Obviously when I do a new basebackup I can "cleanup" any old
>> files that said backup doesn't need,
>>
>
> You have said you might be interested in doing PITR. So you want to delay
> the cleanup so as to not compromise that ability. You need to develop a
> policy on how far back you want to be able to do a PITR.
>
>
>
>> but how do I know what those are?
>>
>
> pg_archivecleanup -n /mnt/server/archiverdir 000000010000000000000010.
> 00000020.backup
>
>
> Ok, but where does that "000000010000000000000010.00000020.backup" come
> from? I mean, I can tell it's a WAL segment file name (plus a backup
> label), but I don't have anything like that in my WAL archives, even though
> I've run pg_basebackup a couple of times.
>

I get one file like that for every pg_basebackup I run. Could your
archive_command be doing something to specifically short-circuit the
writing of those files? Like testing the length of %p or %f?

> Do I have to call something to create that file? Some flag to
> pg_basebackup? At the moment I am running pg_basebackup such that it
> generates gziped tar files, if that makes a difference.
>

That is how I run it as well. I don't think there is a flag to
pg_basebackup which even allows you to bypass the creation of those files.
You are looking in the WAL archive itself, correct? Not somewhere in a
listing of the base.tar.gz file?

Cheers,

Jeff