On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Kevin Grittner <Kevin.Grittner@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Isabella Ghiurea <isabella.ghiurea@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> I would like to configure our Pg db for OS file system snapshot >> backup with Pg WAL files, need to know if would be enough in pg >> db to call : >> |*SELECT* *pg_start_backup*('pitr_backup'); >> and next take the snapshot and after >> pg_stop the backup and close the WAL files . During this time the >> full pg db read/writes will continue. >> Are any loss of data we should may be aware during this backup >> procedure? >> env :RHES-64 bits with LVM directories, PG 9.0, the db size >150GB > > I'm not clear what you mean by "snapshot". If you're talking about > something which takes an *atomic* snapshot of the entire PostgreSQL > data space, including WAL files, then just taking the snapshot is > enough without any other actions. Assuming that you are using safe > settings for fsync, full_page_writes, and synchronous_commit, it > will recover all successfully committed transactions and roll back > all others. > > If you're talking about tar, cpio, or some other software which is > not atomic, you should follow the instructions in the documentation > for one of the supported techniques completely and carefully: For > PITR-style backups, that means ensuring that you have a working flow > of WAL files being captured *before* you run pg_start_backup(). > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/interactive/backup.html > Just to chime in, if it's the latter you are trying to do, you can use the omnipitr scripts to manage this, see https://github.com/omniti-labs/omnipitr/ for details. Robert Treat play: xzilla.net work: omniti.com -- Sent via pgsql-admin mailing list (pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-admin