On Thursday 28 August 2008, "John T. Dow" <john@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > B - To protect against permanent server failure (such as physical > destruction of the server's hard drives), do a pg_dump backup regularly. > The only data loss is data inserted or updated since the last pg_dump. > Use pg_dumpall with the -g option to get the global information, use > pg_dump with the custom output file format to get the data. > > C - To protect against permanent server failure with minimal loss of > data, use the PITR strategy. > There is no reason to choose exclusively B or C. Neither preclude the other, and as you point out they are useful for different things. I do both, and I'm sure others do too. I have a fairly large and very busy database that does PITR base backups nightly (using rsync to a copy of the database data files to cut the time), and also full pg_dumps weekly for data retention. -- Alan
