On Thursday 03 November 2005 07:28, Tony Caduto wrote: > Hi, > Does anyone know if it would be safe to use rsync to mirror a > Postgresql setup to a backup server? > > I need to create a exact duplicate for a disaster recovery server, > the disaster recovery server would not be in use until the > production one went down for > some reason. > > It seems to me that if the postmaster is stopped it should be safe. > Comments? Yes, if the system is shut down you should be able to do a filesystem copy. But I'm confused why this is supposedly better than using the tools provided (pg_dump, pg_dumpall, pg_restore, psql...). Also, unless this is a read-only server, keeping the DR machine up-to-date will require you to stop your server whenever you want to update your DR machine. You can do a filesystem backup on a live machine and bring it up-to-date on a second machine using the log files. You can even keep shipping the log files to the backup server in order to keep it up-to-date which seems like a better solution (and you could use rsync to move the log files if you so desire). Check out 22.3 in the manual for info on on-line backup and recovery: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/backup-online.html You may want to use rsync to keep your configuration files up-to-date. Cheers, Steve ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
