Re: Postgres restart in the middle of exclusive backup and the presence of backup_label file

On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 02:12:19PM -0800, SATYANARAYANA NARLAPURAM wrote:
> While an exclusive backup is in progress if Postgres restarts, postgres
> runs the recovery from the checkpoint identified by the label file instead
> of the control file. This can cause long recovery or even sometimes fail to
> recover as the WAL records corresponding to that checkpoint location are
> removed. I can write a layer in my control plane to remove the backup_label
> file when I know the server is not in restore from the base backup but I
> don't see a reason why everyone has to repeat this step. Am I missing
> something?

This is a known issue with exclusive backups, which is a reason why
non-exclusive backups have been implemented. pg_basebackup does that,
and using "false" as the third argument of pg_start_backup() would
have the same effect. So I would recommend to switch to that.
--
Michael