In an abstract sense, a running PostgreSQL system produces an indefinitely long sequence of WAL records. The system physically divides this sequence into WAL segment files, which are normally 16MB apiece (although the segment size can be altered during initdb). The segment files are given numeric names that reflect their position in the abstract WAL sequence. When not using WAL archiving, the system normally creates just a few segment files and then “recycles” them by renaming no-longer-needed segment files to higher segment numbers. It's assumed that segment files whose contents precede the last checkpoint are no longer of interest and can be recycled.

When archiving WAL data, we need to capture the contents of each segment file once it is filled, and save that data somewhere before the segment file is recycled for reuse. Depending on the application and the available hardware, there could be many different ways of “saving the data somewhere”: we could copy the segment files to an NFS-mounted directory on another machine, write them onto a tape drive (ensuring that you have a way of identifying the original name of each file), or batch them together and burn them onto CDs, or something else entirely. To provide the database administrator with flexibility, PostgreSQL tries not to make any assumptions about how the archiving will be done. Instead, PostgreSQL lets the administrator specify a shell command or an archive library to be executed to copy a completed segment file to wherever it needs to go. This could be as simple as a shell command that uses cp, or it could invoke a complex C function — it's all up to you.

To enable WAL archiving, set the wal_level configuration parameter to replica or higher, archive_mode to on, specify the shell command to use in the archive_command configuration parameter or specify the library to use in the archive_library configuration parameter. In practice these settings will always be placed in the postgresql.conf file.

In archive_command, %p is replaced by the path name of the file to archive, while %f is replaced by only the file name. (The path name is relative to the current working directory, i.e., the cluster's data directory.) Use %% if you need to embed an actual % character in the command. The simplest useful command is something like:

archive_command = 'test ! -f /mnt/server/archivedir/%f && cp %p /mnt/server/archivedir/%f'  # Unix
archive_command = 'copy "%p" "C:\\server\\archivedir\\%f"'  # Windows

which will copy archivable WAL segments to the directory /mnt/server/archivedir. (This is an example, not a recommendation, and might not work on all platforms.) After the %p and %f parameters have been replaced, the actual command executed might look like this:

test ! -f /mnt/server/archivedir/00000001000000A900000065 && cp pg_wal/00000001000000A900000065 /mnt/server/archivedir/00000001000000A900000065

A similar command will be generated for each new file to be archived.

The archive command will be executed under the ownership of the same user that the PostgreSQL server is running as. Since the series of WAL files being archived contains effectively everything in your database, you will want to be sure that the archived data is protected from prying eyes; for example, archive into a directory that does not have group or world read access.

It is important that the archive command return zero exit status if and only if it succeeds. Upon getting a zero result, PostgreSQL will assume that the file has been successfully archived, and will remove or recycle it. However, a nonzero status tells PostgreSQL that the file was not archived; it will try again periodically until it succeeds.

Another way to archive is to use a custom archive module as the archive_library. Since such modules are written in C, creating your own may require considerably more effort than writing a shell command. However, archive modules can be more performant than archiving via shell, and they will have access to many useful server resources. For more information about archive modules, see Chapter 49.

When the archive command is terminated by a signal (other than SIGTERM that is used as part of a server shutdown) or an error by the shell with an exit status greater than 125 (such as command not found), or if the archive function emits an ERROR or FATAL, the archiver process aborts and gets restarted by the postmaster. In such cases, the failure is not reported in pg_stat_archiver.

Archive commands and libraries should generally be designed to refuse to overwrite any pre-existing archive file. This is an important safety feature to preserve the integrity of your archive in case of administrator error (such as sending the output of two different servers to the same archive directory). It is advisable to test your proposed archive library to ensure that it does not overwrite an existing file.

In rare cases, PostgreSQL may attempt to re-archive a WAL file that was previously archived. For example, if the system crashes before the server makes a durable record of archival success, the server will attempt to archive the file again after restarting (provided archiving is still enabled). When an archive command or library encounters a pre-existing file, it should return a zero status or true, respectively, if the WAL file has identical contents to the pre-existing archive and the pre-existing archive is fully persisted to storage. If a pre-existing file contains different contents than the WAL file being archived, the archive command or library must return a nonzero status or false, respectively.

The example command above for Unix avoids overwriting a pre-existing archive by including a separate test step. On some Unix platforms, cp has switches such as -i that can be used to do the same thing less verbosely, but you should not rely on these without verifying that the right exit status is returned. (In particular, GNU cp will return status zero when -i is used and the target file already exists, which is not the desired behavior.)

While designing your archiving setup, consider what will happen if the archive command or library fails repeatedly because some aspect requires operator intervention or the archive runs out of space. For example, this could occur if you write to tape without an autochanger; when the tape fills, nothing further can be archived until the tape is swapped. You should ensure that any error condition or request to a human operator is reported appropriately so that the situation can be resolved reasonably quickly. The pg_wal/ directory will continue to fill with WAL segment files until the situation is resolved. (If the file system containing pg_wal/ fills up, PostgreSQL will do a PANIC shutdown. No committed transactions will be lost, but the database will remain offline until you free some space.)

The speed of the archive command or library is unimportant as long as it can keep up with the average rate at which your server generates WAL data. Normal operation continues even if the archiving process falls a little behind. If archiving falls significantly behind, this will increase the amount of data that would be lost in the event of a disaster. It will also mean that the pg_wal/ directory will contain large numbers of not-yet-archived segment files, which could eventually exceed available disk space. You are advised to monitor the archiving process to ensure that it is working as you intend.

In writing your archive command or library, you should assume that the file names to be archived can be up to 64 characters long and can contain any combination of ASCII letters, digits, and dots. It is not necessary to preserve the original relative path (%p) but it is necessary to preserve the file name (%f).

Note that although WAL archiving will allow you to restore any modifications made to the data in your PostgreSQL database, it will not restore changes made to configuration files (that is, postgresql.conf, pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf), since those are edited manually rather than through SQL operations. You might wish to keep the configuration files in a location that will be backed up by your regular file system backup procedures. See Section 19.2 for how to relocate the configuration files.

The archive command or function is only invoked on completed WAL segments. Hence, if your server generates only little WAL traffic (or has slack periods where it does so), there could be a long delay between the completion of a transaction and its safe recording in archive storage. To put a limit on how old unarchived data can be, you can set archive_timeout to force the server to switch to a new WAL segment file at least that often. Note that archived files that are archived early due to a forced switch are still the same length as completely full files. It is therefore unwise to set a very short archive_timeout — it will bloat your archive storage. archive_timeout settings of a minute or so are usually reasonable.

Also, you can force a segment switch manually with pg_switch_wal if you want to ensure that a just-finished transaction is archived as soon as possible. Other utility functions related to WAL management are listed in Table 9.95.

When wal_level is minimal some SQL commands are optimized to avoid WAL logging, as described in Section 14.4.7. If archiving or streaming replication were turned on during execution of one of these statements, WAL would not contain enough information for archive recovery. (Crash recovery is unaffected.) For this reason, wal_level can only be changed at server start. However, archive_command and archive_library can be changed with a configuration file reload. If you are archiving via shell and wish to temporarily stop archiving, one way to do it is to set archive_command to the empty string (''). This will cause WAL files to accumulate in pg_wal/ until a working archive_command is re-established.

The easiest way to perform a base backup is to use the pg_basebackup tool. It can create a base backup either as regular files or as a tar archive. If more flexibility than pg_basebackup can provide is required, you can also make a base backup using the low level API (see Section 25.3.4).

It is not necessary to be concerned about the amount of time it takes to make a base backup. However, if you normally run the server with full_page_writes disabled, you might notice a drop in performance while the backup runs since full_page_writes is effectively forced on during backup mode.

To make use of the backup, you will need to keep all the WAL segment files generated during and after the file system backup. To aid you in doing this, the base backup process creates a backup history file that is immediately stored into the WAL archive area. This file is named after the first WAL segment file that you need for the file system backup. For example, if the starting WAL file is 0000000100001234000055CD the backup history file will be named something like 0000000100001234000055CD.007C9330.backup. (The second part of the file name stands for an exact position within the WAL file, and can ordinarily be ignored.) Once you have safely archived the file system backup and the WAL segment files used during the backup (as specified in the backup history file), all archived WAL segments with names numerically less are no longer needed to recover the file system backup and can be deleted. However, you should consider keeping several backup sets to be absolutely certain that you can recover your data.

The backup history file is just a small text file. It contains the label string you gave to pg_basebackup, as well as the starting and ending times and WAL segments of the backup. If you used the label to identify the associated dump file, then the archived history file is enough to tell you which dump file to restore.

Since you have to keep around all the archived WAL files back to your last base backup, the interval between base backups should usually be chosen based on how much storage you want to expend on archived WAL files. You should also consider how long you are prepared to spend recovering, if recovery should be necessary — the system will have to replay all those WAL segments, and that could take awhile if it has been a long time since the last base backup.

You can use pg_basebackup to take an incremental backup by specifying the --incremental option. You must supply, as an argument to --incremental, the backup manifest to an earlier backup from the same server. In the resulting backup, non-relation files will be included in their entirety, but some relation files may be replaced by smaller incremental files which contain only the blocks which have been changed since the earlier backup and enough metadata to reconstruct the current version of the file.

To figure out which blocks need to be backed up, the server uses WAL summaries, which are stored in the data directory, inside the directory pg_wal/summaries. If the required summary files are not present, an attempt to take an incremental backup will fail. The summaries present in this directory must cover all LSNs from the start LSN of the prior backup to the start LSN of the current backup. Since the server looks for WAL summaries just after establishing the start LSN of the current backup, the necessary summary files probably won't be instantly present on disk, but the server will wait for any missing files to show up. This also helps if the WAL summarization process has fallen behind. However, if the necessary files have already been removed, or if the WAL summarizer doesn't catch up quickly enough, the incremental backup will fail.

When restoring an incremental backup, it will be necessary to have not only the incremental backup itself but also all earlier backups that are required to supply the blocks omitted from the incremental backup. See pg_combinebackup for further information about this requirement. Note that there are restrictions on the use of pg_combinebackup when the checksum status of the cluster has been changed; see pg_combinebackup limitations.

Note that all of the requirements for making use of a full backup also apply to an incremental backup. For instance, you still need all of the WAL segment files generated during and after the file system backup, and any relevant WAL history files. And you still need to create a recovery.signal (or standby.signal) and perform recovery, as described in Section 25.3.5. The requirement to have earlier backups available at restore time and to use pg_combinebackup is an additional requirement on top of everything else. Keep in mind that PostgreSQL has no built-in mechanism to figure out which backups are still needed as a basis for restoring later incremental backups. You must keep track of the relationships between your full and incremental backups on your own, and be certain not to remove earlier backups if they might be needed when restoring later incremental backups.

Incremental backups typically only make sense for relatively large databases where a significant portion of the data does not change, or only changes slowly. For a small database, it's simpler to ignore the existence of incremental backups and simply take full backups, which are simpler to manage. For a large database all of which is heavily modified, incremental backups won't be much smaller than full backups.

An incremental backup is only possible if replay would begin from a later checkpoint than for the previous backup upon which it depends. If you take the incremental backup on the primary, this condition is always satisfied, because each backup triggers a new checkpoint. On a standby, replay begins from the most recent restartpoint. Therefore, an incremental backup of a standby server can fail if there has been very little activity since the previous backup, since no new restartpoint might have been created.

Instead of taking a full or incremental base backup using pg_basebackup, you can take a base backup using the low-level API. This procedure contains a few more steps than the pg_basebackup method, but is relatively simple. It is very important that these steps are executed in sequence, and that the success of a step is verified before proceeding to the next step.

Multiple backups are able to be run concurrently (both those started using this backup API and those started using pg_basebackup).

Okay, the worst has happened and you need to recover from your backup. Here is the procedure:

The key part of all this is to set up a recovery configuration that describes how you want to recover and how far the recovery should run. The one thing that you absolutely must specify is the restore_command, which tells PostgreSQL how to retrieve archived WAL file segments. Like the archive_command, this is a shell command string. It can contain %f, which is replaced by the name of the desired WAL file, and %p, which is replaced by the path name to copy the WAL file to. (The path name is relative to the current working directory, i.e., the cluster's data directory.) Write %% if you need to embed an actual % character in the command. The simplest useful command is something like:

restore_command = 'cp /mnt/server/archivedir/%f %p'

which will copy previously archived WAL segments from the directory /mnt/server/archivedir. Of course, you can use something much more complicated, perhaps even a shell script that requests the operator to mount an appropriate tape.

It is important that the command return nonzero exit status on failure. The command will be called requesting files that are not present in the archive; it must return nonzero when so asked. This is not an error condition. An exception is that if the command was terminated by a signal (other than SIGTERM, which is used as part of a database server shutdown) or an error by the shell (such as command not found), then recovery will abort and the server will not start up.

Not all of the requested files will be WAL segment files; you should also expect requests for files with a suffix of .history. Also be aware that the base name of the %p path will be different from %f; do not expect them to be interchangeable.

WAL segments that cannot be found in the archive will be sought in pg_wal/; this allows use of recent un-archived segments. However, segments that are available from the archive will be used in preference to files in pg_wal/.

Normally, recovery will proceed through all available WAL segments, thereby restoring the database to the current point in time (or as close as possible given the available WAL segments). Therefore, a normal recovery will end with a “file not found” message, the exact text of the error message depending upon your choice of restore_command. You may also see an error message at the start of recovery for a file named something like 00000001.history. This is also normal and does not indicate a problem in simple recovery situations; see Section 25.3.6 for discussion.

If you want to recover to some previous point in time (say, right before the junior DBA dropped your main transaction table), just specify the required stopping point. You can specify the stop point, known as the “recovery target”, either by date/time, named restore point or by completion of a specific transaction ID. As of this writing only the date/time and named restore point options are very usable, since there are no tools to help you identify with any accuracy which transaction ID to use.

If recovery finds corrupted WAL data, recovery will halt at that point and the server will not start. In such a case the recovery process could be re-run from the beginning, specifying a “recovery target” before the point of corruption so that recovery can complete normally. If recovery fails for an external reason, such as a system crash or if the WAL archive has become inaccessible, then the recovery can simply be restarted and it will restart almost from where it failed. Recovery restart works much like checkpointing in normal operation: the server periodically forces all its state to disk, and then updates the pg_control file to indicate that the already-processed WAL data need not be scanned again.

The ability to restore the database to a previous point in time creates some complexities that are akin to science-fiction stories about time travel and parallel universes. For example, in the original history of the database, suppose you dropped a critical table at 5:15PM on Tuesday evening, but didn't realize your mistake until Wednesday noon. Unfazed, you get out your backup, restore to the point-in-time 5:14PM Tuesday evening, and are up and running. In this history of the database universe, you never dropped the table. But suppose you later realize this wasn't such a great idea, and would like to return to sometime Wednesday morning in the original history. You won't be able to if, while your database was up-and-running, it overwrote some of the WAL segment files that led up to the time you now wish you could get back to. Thus, to avoid this, you need to distinguish the series of WAL records generated after you've done a point-in-time recovery from those that were generated in the original database history.

To deal with this problem, PostgreSQL has a notion of timelines. Whenever an archive recovery completes, a new timeline is created to identify the series of WAL records generated after that recovery. The timeline ID number is part of WAL segment file names so a new timeline does not overwrite the WAL data generated by previous timelines. For example, in the WAL file name 0000000100001234000055CD, the leading 00000001 is the timeline ID in hexadecimal. (Note that in other contexts, such as server log messages, timeline IDs are usually printed in decimal.)

It is in fact possible to archive many different timelines. While that might seem like a useless feature, it's often a lifesaver. Consider the situation where you aren't quite sure what point-in-time to recover to, and so have to do several point-in-time recoveries by trial and error until you find the best place to branch off from the old history. Without timelines this process would soon generate an unmanageable mess. With timelines, you can recover to any prior state, including states in timeline branches that you abandoned earlier.

Every time a new timeline is created, PostgreSQL creates a “timeline history” file that shows which timeline it branched off from and when. These history files are necessary to allow the system to pick the right WAL segment files when recovering from an archive that contains multiple timelines. Therefore, they are archived into the WAL archive area just like WAL segment files. The history files are just small text files, so it's cheap and appropriate to keep them around indefinitely (unlike the segment files which are large). You can, if you like, add comments to a history file to record your own notes about how and why this particular timeline was created. Such comments will be especially valuable when you have a thicket of different timelines as a result of experimentation.

The default behavior of recovery is to recover to the latest timeline found in the archive. If you wish to recover to the timeline that was current when the base backup was taken or into a specific child timeline (that is, you want to return to some state that was itself generated after a recovery attempt), you need to specify current or the target timeline ID in recovery_target_timeline. You cannot recover into timelines that branched off earlier than the base backup.

Some tips for configuring continuous archiving are given here.

archive_command = 'gzip < %p > /mnt/server/archivedir/%f.gz'

restore_command = 'gunzip < /mnt/server/archivedir/%f.gz > %p'

archive_command = 'local_backup_script.sh "%p" "%f"'

At this writing, there are several limitations of the continuous archiving technique. These will probably be fixed in future releases:

It should also be noted that the default WAL format is fairly bulky since it includes many disk page snapshots. These page snapshots are designed to support crash recovery, since we might need to fix partially-written disk pages. Depending on your system hardware and software, the risk of partial writes might be small enough to ignore, in which case you can significantly reduce the total volume of archived WAL files by turning off page snapshots using the full_page_writes parameter. (Read the notes and warnings in Chapter 28 before you do so.) Turning off page snapshots does not prevent use of the WAL for PITR operations. An area for future development is to compress archived WAL data by removing unnecessary page copies even when full_page_writes is on. In the meantime, administrators might wish to reduce the number of page snapshots included in WAL by increasing the checkpoint interval parameters as much as feasible.