Re: archived WALL files question

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Renato Oliveira <
renato(dot)oliveira(at)grant(dot)co(dot)uk> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
>
>
> I was reading again the documentation... “The archive command should
> generally de designed to refuse to overwrite any pre-existing archive file.”
>
> This means it will keep writing logs to the folder specified forever, and
> without an intervention, the media will run out of space.
>
>
>
> What do you guys do with regards to this situation, for example:
>
> How to you clean up the old archived logs?
>
>
>
> For example:
>
> you archive your log files from your main Postgres server to a folder
> /mnt/pitr for example
>
> You set your standby to pick the logs from /mnt/pitr, then it archives each
> log as it comes.
>
> /mnt/pitr will fill up very quickly and run out of space if we don’t have a
> process to DELETE/ARCHIEVE older logs.
>
>
>
> I guess the process which picks up the logs for the standby server, needs
> to take care of the logs, by deleting the older ones or by archiving them
> permanently?
>
Depends on what it is you're trying to accomplish:

*) PITR slave server constantly applying logs

If all you want is a server to constantly apply the logs and you don't
care about them afterwards, look into the '%r' macro in pg_standby. It will
automatically archive files for you -- Of course, your standby instance
needs to have write access to the /mnt/pitr folder to delete from.

If you are using the archive_command to copy files in the /mnt/pitr
directory, and then doing a cron based copy to a backup server, have your
cronjob delete files from the primary after it is confirmed that the logs
got shipped safely to the backup.

*) Backup retention time

If you're trying to keep logs around so that you can do a point in time
recovery with old backups, you want to figure your retention times and
determine your RTO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_time_objective).

If you need to be able to recovery to any point in time for the past 1
week with a low RTO, then you want to keep that week's worth of logs
uncompressed and available. Anything beyond that, use a cron job to
compress the logs (they usually compress pretty well based on your data).

Basically, you need to keep all the low-RTO required logs around so
that you can quickly get at them. If you don't have any low RTO
requirements and you just want to keep a few weeks worth of data around, I
would recommend that you add a few lines of code to the end of your backup
job to compress (or you could delete if you don't want them) all the logs
prior to the backup that you are taking.

Hope this helps

--Scott

>
>
> How do you guys deal with this problem?
>
>
>
> Thank you very much in advance
>
>
>
> Best regards
>
>
>
> Renato
>
>
>
>
>
> Renato Oliveira
> Systems Administrator
> e-mail: renato(dot)oliveira(at)grant(dot)co(dot)uk
>
> Tel: +44 (0)1763 260811
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