Doug Knight wrote:
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.
Most of your virtual-layer filesystems should offer a snapshot facility that lets the database think its writing to the files while you see a static version. You could rsync that against an older file-level copy as the base copy in a PITR backup.
Note - even with a snapshot facility you need to use PITR or stop the database to get a guaranteed working copy.
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