On Thursday 28 August 2008, "John T. Dow" <john@johntdow.com> 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
