The docs recommend using tar to perform a base backup for PITR. Usually, tar reports notices like: "tar: Truncated write; file may have grown while being archived." First of all, is the tar archive still safe if those errors occur? Second, it seems that it can cause a bad backup to occur if you pass the "z" option to tar. Instead, piping the output of tar through the compression program seems to avoid that problem (i.e. "tar cf - ... | gzip > ..."). I am using FreeBSD's tar, other implementations may be different. Are my observations correct, and if so, should they be documented as a potential "gotcha" when making base backups? Regards, Jeff Davis
