I would also be interested in any "creative" ways to reduce the size and time to backup databases/clusters. We were just having a conversation about this yesterday. We were mulling over things like using rsync to only backup files in the database directory tree that actually changed. Or maybe doing a selective backup of files based on modified times, etc, but were unsure if this would be a safe, reliable way to backup a reduced set of data.
Doug Knight WSI Inc. Andover, MA On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 12:45 +0530, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Hi Folks, > > We have a requirement to deal with large databases of the size > Terabytes when we go into production. What is the best database > back-up mechanism and possible issues? > > pg_dump can back-up database but the dump file is limited by OS > file-size limit. What about the option of compressing the dump file? > How much time does it generally take for large databases? I heard, > that it would be way too long (even one or days). I haven't tried it > out, though. > > What about taking zipped back-up of the database directory? We tried > this out but the checkpoint data in pg_xlogs directory is also being > backed-up. Since these logs keeps on increasing from day1 of database > creation, the back_up size if increasing drastically. > Can we back-up certain subdirectories without loss of information or > consistency..? > > Any quick comments/suggestions in this regard would be very helpful. > > Thanks in advance, > Ravi Kumar Mandala