Standalone Hot Backups

[Sergey Arlashin <sergeyarl.maillist@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

I'm reading this article http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/continuous-archiving.htm

In section 'Making a Base Backup Using the Low Level API' is said that once one has WAL archiving set up it is ok to omit pg_xlog folder from the backup dump:

"You can, however, omit from the backup dump the files within the cluster's pg_xlog/ subdirectory. This slight adjustment is worthwhile because it reduces the risk of mistakes when restoring. This is easy to arrange if pg_xlog/ is a symbolic link pointing to someplace outside the cluster directory, which is a common setup anyway for performance reasons. You might also want to exclude postmaster.pid and postmaster.opts, which record information about the running postmaster, not about the postmaster which will eventually use this backup. (These files can confuse pg_ctl.)"

But in section related to making standalone hot backups there is no information about it. 

There is only the following set of commands:

touch /var/lib/pgsql/backup_in_progress

psql -c "select pg_start_backup('hot_backup');"

tar -cf /var/lib/pgsql/backup.tar /var/lib/pgsql/data/

psql -c "select pg_stop_backup();"

rm /var/lib/pgsql/backup_in_progress

tar -rf /var/lib/pgsql/backup.tar /var/lib/pgsql/archive/

I only can see that the backup folder is being archived with pg_xlog. 

So, the question is - is it ok to omit pg_xlog folder from backup dump while making standalone hot backups or not ?

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best regards,

Sergey