Hi
I have been grappling with a problem for some time I would appreciate some advice on. We have a public health application which is web based with a postgresql backing store which is designed for use by the public sector ministry of health in a significant number of African, Asian and other countries (http//:dhis2.org). "Traditionally" it is hosted as a national data warehouse application with users dispersed amongst district offices and sometimes health facilities around the country.
Particularly in many countries in Africa the public sector typically has limited data centre infrastructure to reliably host the application in-house and so a good number have opted to use some global cloud service (infrastructure as a service) to ensure maximum availability of the application. Others have managed to make use of in-country resources such as national ISPs and mobile companies. There are many cost-benefit and governance considerations behind these decisions which I don't need to go into here.
Whereas ministries have been prepared to do this there are important to reasons to ensure that a backup of the database can be maintained in the ministry. So we attempt to grab the nightly snapshot backups from the database each night. In the past I have attempted this somewhat simplistically with rsync over ssh but it is a very inefficient approach and particularly so over weak internet connections.
What are people's thoughts about a more optimal solution? I would like to use a more incremental approach to replication. This does not have to be a "live" replication .. asynchronously triggering once every 24 hours is sufficient. Also there are only a subset of tables which are required (the rest consist of data which is generated).
Appreciate any advice.
Regards
Bob
