Greetings, I'm running postgresql-9.1.3 on a Linux-x86_64 (Fedora16, if it matters) system. I noticed the existence of pg_basebackup starting in 9.1, and figured I'd try it out and see if it would simplify our backup & management processes. I setup a test system (same OS & postgresql version as production) with a fairly recent snapshot of our production database, invoked it, and saw the following output: ###### # pg_basebackup -P -v -D backups -Ft -z -U postgres 135717206/135717230 kB (100%), 1/1 tablespace pg_basebackup: could not get WAL end position from server ###### I wasn't sure what that error meant, so after googling a bit, turns out that it really means that there were one or more files not owned by the postgres user (see http://serverfault.com/questions/312205/pg-basebackup-could-not-get-wal-end-position-from-server ). Sure enough, the file that wasn't owned by the postgres user was the backup tarball that pg_basebackup was creating, since I had been running it as root. That error is rather cryptic, and it would be helpful if it was improved to suggest the real cause of the failure. Anyway, lesson learned, I need to either invoke pg_basebackup as the same user that runs the database (or is specified with the -U parameter ?), or write the backup somewhere outside of the directory structure that is being backed up. I eventually also found the following entries in the postgresql server log: FATAL: could not open directory "./backups": Permission denied FATAL: archive member "backups/base.tar.gz" too large for tar format What concerns me is the 2nd fatal error. The tarball that pg_basebackup created before erroring out is about 12GB: 12393094165 base.tar.gz I wasn't aware of any 12GB file size limit for tar, so this is a bit of a mystery to me. Regardless, I'd be happy to try some other archiving strategy, but the man page for pg_basebackup suggests that there are only two formats, tar and basically just copying the filesystem. If I copied the filesystem, I'd still have to find some way to archive them for easy management (copying elsewhere, etc). Has anyone come up with a good strategy on how to deal with it? thanks -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
