On Jan 30, 2006, at 6:58 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Rick Gigger <rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
And here is the real million dollar question. Let's say for some
reason I don't have the last WAL file I need for my backup to be
valid. Will it die and tell me it's bad or will it just start up
with a screwed up data directory?
It'll restore up to the end of the data it has. The only case that's
actually "invalid" is not restoring far enough to cover the time
window
that the original base backup was taken over. Otherwise it's just a
situation of restoring up to a particular point in time...
That's what I mean by invalid. Let's say I do something stupid and
do a physical backup and I don't grab the current WAL file. All I
have is the last one to be archived before I did my backup, which is
not late enough to do a valid restore. Will postgres know that the
restore process failed because I didn't have that last necessary WAL
file or will it just start up in a potentially inconsistent state.
Obviously that would be my fault not postgres' since I am the one
that didn't give it the data it needed to do a full restore. But I
am just wondering if that is a potential area to shoot yourself in
the foot or if postgres will put the safety on for me.
Rick
