To: "Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net>
cc: Steve Poe <steve.poe@gmail.com>, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Planning hot/live backups? 
In-reply-to: <47E8128E.1060600@zeut.net> 
References: <721b21dc0803241323u73443060w3a1912d52714549b@mail.gmail.com>
	<47E8128E.1060600@zeut.net>
Comments: In-reply-to "Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net>
	message dated "Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:43:58 -0400"
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:23:48 -0400
Message-ID: <3769.1206397428@sss.pgh.pa.us>
From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

"Matthew T. O'Connor" <matthew@zeut.net> writes:
> Steve Poe wrote:
>> The owners of the animal hospital where I work at want to consider live/hot
>> backups through out the day so we're less likely to lose a whole
>> day of transaction.  We use Postgresql 8.0.15. We do 3AM
>> backups, using pg_dumpall, to a file when there is very little activity.

> You probably want to look into PITR, you can have a constant ongoing 
> backup of your data and never lose more than a few minutes of data.  The 
> overhead isn't all the big especially if you are shipping the log files 
> to a separate server.

But note that you really need to update to a newer major release before
depending on PITR.  While 8.0 nominally has support for it, it's taken
us several releases to really get the operational gotchas sorted out.

			regards, tom lane