On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 9:17 AM, Christophe Pettus <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Feb 27, 2014, at 12:40 AM, Daniel Farina <[email protected]> wrote: >> Is that file actually portable between systems and configurations? > > In the modern world of on-demand instances, I think it largely is... or, at > least, the work of properly configuring it is less than the work of > recreating it from scratch on a new system. In particular, it seems strange > to me that WAL-E will back up random files that just happen to be in PGBASE, > but excludes files that are actually required to fire the server up. > > People who have custom hardware running on Centos systems may have trouble, > yes. On the other hand, that's a pretty well-understood trouble, whereas > "Where did the postgresql.conf go?" is surprising. > > It's a non-issue on Debian, as I'm not suggesting that the backup walk over > to /etc/postgresql to grab everything, but a policy of "Everything under > PGBASE is backed up except for this random set of *.conf files documented in > the code" seems hard to justify.
I see it as the opposite: I rely on the fact that configuration is re-done on every database install, even if the data is a copy from another database. All my postgresql.confs are systematically unique (including the paths), so the .conf of the old machine is *never* of use to me, and can even be harmful. That's why this measure is put into place. I have taken advantage of this timeless nature of the backups as to very slowly (and risk-aversely) roll out change over time, because the backups represent a fairly thin contract: the data, and not the file system layout or particular configuration of the server. New on-demand servers are made systematically, but they need not worry so much about the configuration of their elder siblings. Relying on things the other way requires me to think a lot harder about what could possibly be in the archives. If you really want to keep .confs in the backups, I suggest bracketing WAL-E's restore/fetch in "cp postgresql.conf postgresql.conf.backup" and moving it back after restore. But, if you have systematic instance provisioning, I advise against it for the above reasons. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "wal-e" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
