On 4/12/24 11:50, David Steele wrote: > On 4/12/24 19:09, Magnus Hagander wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 12:14 AM David Steele <da...@pgmasters.net >> >> ...>> >> > But yeah, having to keep the backups as expanded directories is >> not >> > great, I'd love to have .tar. Not necessarily because of the disk >> space >> > (in my experience the compression in filesystems works quite >> well for >> > this purpose), but mostly because it's more compact and allows >> working >> > with backups as a single piece of data (e.g. it's much cleared >> what the >> > checksum of a single .tar is, compared to a directory). >> >> But again, object stores are commonly used for backup these days and >> billing is based on data stored rather than any compression that >> can be >> done on the data. Of course, you'd want to store the compressed >> tars in >> the object store, but that does mean storing an expanded copy >> somewhere >> to do pg_combinebackup. >> >> Object stores are definitely getting more common. I wish they were >> getting a lot more common than they actually are, because they >> simplify a lot. But they're in my experience still very far from >> being a majority. > > I see it the other way, especially the last few years. The majority seem > to be object stores followed up closely by NFS. Directly mounted storage > on the backup host appears to be rarer. >
One thing I'd mention is that not having built-in support for .tar and .tgz backups does not mean it's impossible to use pg_combinebackup with archives. You can mount them using e.g. "ratarmount" and then use that as source directories for pg_combinebackup. It's not entirely friction-less because AFAICS it's necessary to do the backup in plain format and then do the .tar to have the expected "flat" directory structure (and not manifest + 2x tar). But other than that it seems to work fine (based on my limited testing). FWIW the "archivemount" performs terribly, so adding this capability into pg_combinebackup is clearly far from trivial. regards -- Tomas Vondra EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
