On 6/13/23 06:34, Francisco Olarte wrote: [snip]
But if you want to restore to ANY point in time you would need a copy of the initial state of the database and ALL the wal files. Normally you do not want to do this, at most you want to restore to "any point in the last 3 days", in which case you will need a copy of the datafiles from 3 days ago plus all the wals from there plus change.
[snip]
This is confusing. WALs are not backup per se, they are a recovery mechanism. You do a backup of the main data files and the wal files because you do not want to stop the world to do the backup. The COPY of the datafiles and the wals is the backup. If you want to restore to a very far point in a DB which has very large files it will take a lot of space. But if you did it that way the copy of the data files will not be in the initial ( empty ) copy of the datafiles, it will just be in the wal copy, and it needs to be somewhere if you want to do that.
PgBackRest (and presumably barman) handles all this for you. Even compresses the WAL and data files.
-- Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia.
