dealing with file size when archiving databases - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Andrew L. Gould
Subject dealing with file size when archiving databases
Date
Msg-id 200506202128.51463.algould@datawok.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: dealing with file size when archiving databases  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Re: dealing with file size when archiving databases  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@surnet.cl>)
Re: dealing with file size when archiving databases  (Tino Wildenhain <tino@wildenhain.de>)
Re: dealing with file size when archiving databases  (Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>)
List pgsql-general
I've been backing up my databases by piping pg_dump into gzip and
burning the resulting files to a DVD-R.  Unfortunately, FreeBSD has
problems dealing with very large files (>1GB?) on DVD media.  One of my
compressed database backups is greater than 1GB; and the results of a
gzipped pg_dumpall is approximately 3.5GB.  The processes for creating
the iso image and burning the image to DVD-R finish without any
problems; but the resulting file is unreadable/unusable.

My proposed solution is to modify my python script to:

1. use pg_dump to dump each database's tables individually, including
both the database and table name in the file name;
3. use 'pg_dumpall -g' to dump the global information; and
4. burn the backup directories, files and a recovery script to DVD-R.

The script will pipe pg_dump into gzip to compress the files.

My questions are:

1. Will 'pg_dumpall -g' dump everything not dumped by pg_dump?  Will I
be missing anything?
2. Does anyone foresee any problems with the solution above?

Thanks,

Andrew Gould

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