Our documentation suggests that you can take a base backup of a warm standby server while it's running:
> If we take a backup of the standby server's data directory while it is > processing logs shipped from the primary, we will be able to reload that data > and restart the standby's recovery process from the last restart point. We no > longer need to keep WAL files from before the restart point. If we need to > recover, it will be faster to recover from the incrementally updated backup > than from the original base backup. That doesn't seem safe. If the server makes a new restartpoint while the backup is running, and pg_control is backed up after the new restartpoint is made, recovery will restart from the new restartpoint. That is wrong; recovery needs to restart at the restartpoint that was most recent when the backup started. This is basically the same issue we have solved in master with the backup_label file. I wonder if it would be enough to document that pg_control must be backed up first? -- Heikki Linnakangas EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
