Tom Lane wrote:
Andreas Pflug <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Tom Lane wrote:

This is silly.  Why not just turn archiving on and off?


Not quite. I want online backup, but no archiving. Currently, I have to edit postgresql.conf and SIGHUP to "turn on archiving" configuring a (hopefully) writable directory, do the backup, edit postgresql.conf and SIGHUP again. Not too convenient...


You don't get to count the edit/SIGHUP steps, because those would be the
same for any other GUC.

That's right, but my proposal would implicitely switch on archiving while backup is in progress, thus explicitely enabling/disabling archiving wouldn't be necessary.

AFAICS you could get the effect by setting up an archive_command script
        sleep 100
        exit 1
so that the archiver will do nothing.

Doesn't WAL expect the WAL files already archived to be recyclable, so they could get overwritten in the pg_xlog dir while backup is running? Additionally, the doc recommends omitting pg_xlog from the file level backup, so a restart would need the archived wal files, no?



BTW, I don't actually understand why you want this at all.  If you're
not going to keep a continuing series of WAL files, you don't have any
PITR capability.  What you're proposing seems like a bulky, unportable,
hard-to-use equivalent of pg_dump.  Why not use pg_dump?

Because pg_dump will take too long and create bloated dump files. All I need is a physical backup for disaster recovery purposes without bringing down the server.

In my case, I'd expect a DB that uses 114GB on disk to consume 1.4TB when pg_dumped, too much for the available backup capacity (esp. compared to net content, about 290GB). See other post "inefficient bytea escaping" for details.

Regards,
Andreas

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