Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2024 16:54:29 -0500
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: gparc@free.fr
Cc: gparc <gparc@online.fr>, pgsql-docs <pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Add a different archive_command example for Linux / Unix
Message-ID: <ZcVNlVIEa5BOpmdE@tamriel.snowman.net>
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Greetings,

* gparc@free.fr (gparc@free.fr) wrote:
> Thanks Stephen for your detailed reply and broad perspective.
> But I see the cp example command used **as is** most of the time.

In those cases- how would changing it to be a dd command be helpful?
The directory still wouldn't be fsync'd and there's a very good chance
that the rest of the documentation isn't followed or understood either,
leading almost certainly to broken backup setups.  This wouldn't be the
only issue in any case, to be sure.

This comes back to my earlier suggestion that perhaps we should just
change it to something like:

archive_command = 'backup_tool %p /mnt/server/archivedir/%f'

and not talk about specific tools that exist but don't perform in the
manner we actually expect from an archive command that we're using.  We
already make it pretty clear to anyone who knows the tools mentioned
that the 'example' command won't work, if you read everything under that
section.

Alternatively, we could actually document the tools we're aware of that
do work and which do strive, at least, to try and be good backup tools
and good archive commands for PG.  That would certainly be a service to
our users and might result in far fewer misconfigured systems using the
examples because they thought (despite the explicit note in our
documentation) that they were recommendations.

Thanks,

Stephen

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