so the outfit i'm currently working for on a quasi-full time basis has what amounts to an OLTP database server in colocation. the footprint in the rack is very small, that is, there's no DLT autoloader or anything of that sort in the rack.
the temporary backup solution was to do full dumps in cron every night and use scp to move them to the office server. this has clear scaling problems, but was an ok quick hack back in march. well, now it's may and the magnitude of the scaling problems are becoming very obvious. the scp is taking an absurd amount of time (the backup times themselves aren't all that bad, but the office is behind a business road runner connection and the scp is severely bandwidth limited.) so i'm outlining a longer term solution, and would be interested in suggestions/comments. part 1 is to reduce the frequency of the full dumps, and start using a WAL based incremental solution such as is outlined here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/backup-online.html part 2 is going to be to set up amanda to roll this stuff to a DLT drive in the office. i figure that i probably want to do full backups of the incremental WAL files each time so i'm not rummaging around the tape library trying to find all of them should the worst case happen. but what are the consequences of backing up a WAL file if the archive process (probably scp in this case) is running when the backup copy is made? the whole thing won't make it onto tape, are there any downsides to running a recover with an incomplete WAL file? and if there are better solutions, i'm interested in hearing about them. thanks, richard ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
