On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 10:57 AM, John T. Dow <john@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > BACKGROUND INFO BEGINS > > Recently I had some questions about doing backups and received very helpful replies. I have now put together a BAT file to do a routine backup, using pg_dumpall with the -g option to get the roles, and pg_dump with the custom format to get all the data. > > I am now testing this process to make sure it is possible to recover data up to the last minute in the event of a catastrophic server failure. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works. You can't apply saved WAL files to a database restored from a dump. To use PITR, you need to do a physical backup of the actual database files (after calling the pg_start_backup() function), then when that is done, call pg_stop_backup(). You then archive WAL files as the database runs normally. To recover, you do a physical restore of the database files, then run recovery using the archived WAL files. Read the documentation on PITR again--it's reasonably complete. -Doug
