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From: Jim Nasby <decibel@decibel.org>
Subject: Re: PITR and tar
Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 10:25:58 -0500
To: Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>

On May 7, 2007, at 1:58 PM, Jeff Davis wrote:
> Second, it seems that it can cause a bad backup to occur if you  
> pass the
> "z" option to tar. Instead, piping the output of tar through the
> compression program seems to avoid that problem (i.e. "tar cf - ... |
> gzip > ..."). I am using FreeBSD's tar, other implementations may be
> different.

What *exactly* are you seeing there? If anything -z should be safer  
than piping through gzip, since you could easily accidentally pipe  
stderr through gzip as well, which *would* corrupt the backup.

> Are my observations correct, and if so, should they be documented as a
> potential "gotcha" when making base backups?

I believe the bit about tar complaining about changed files is  
already in there, no?
--
Jim Nasby                                            jim@nasby.net
EnterpriseDB      http://enterprisedb.com      512.569.9461 (cell)