On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 15:24 -0700, John Smith wrote: > Actually, I forgot to mention one more detail in my original post. > For the table that we're looking to backup, we also want to be able to > do incremental backups. pg_dump will cause the entire table to be > dumped out each time it is invoked. > > With the pg_{start,stop}_backup approach, incremental backups could be > implemented by just rsync'ing the data files for example and applying > the incremental WALs. So if table foo didn't change very much since > the first backup, we would only need to rsync a small amount of data > plus the WALs to get an incremental backup for table foo. > > Besides picking up data on unwanted tables from the WAL (e.g., bar > would appear in our recovered database even though we only wanted > foo), do you see any other problems with this pg_{start,stop}_backup > approach? Admittedly, it does seem a bit hacky. You wouldn't be the first to ask to restore only a single table. I can produce a custom version that does that if you like, though I'm not sure that feature would be accepted into the main code. -- Simon Riggs 2ndQuadrant http://www.2ndQuadrant.com