Christopher Weimann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > You can do snapshots in FreeBSD 5.x with UFS2 as well but that ( > nor XFS snapshots ) will let you backup with the database server > running. Just because you will get the file exactly as it was at > a particular instant does not mean that the postmaster did not > still have some some data that was not flushed to disk yet.
It *will* work, if you have an instantaneous filesystem snapshot covering the entire $PGDATA directory tree (both data files and WAL). Restarting the postmaster on the backup will result in a WAL replay sequence, and at the end the data files will be consistent. If this were not so, we'd not be crash-proof. The instantaneous snapshot is exactly equivalent to the on-disk state at the moment of a kernel crash or power failure, no? regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match