Let's say that you began this in January. According to your retention plan, you will have:
Base Backups:
--------------
Jan 31, 2014
Feb 28, 2014
Mar 31, 2014
Apr 30, 2014
May 31, 2014
Jun 30, 2014
July 31, 2014
WAL Logs:
Daily WAL logs since Jun 5, 2014
If my understanding is correct, none of your base backups prior to Jun 5, 2014 will be useful for recovering any PITR other than the specific time _of_ the base backup. You cannot replay later WALs on the March backup, for example, as you are missing all of the WAL segments between Mar 31, 2014 and Jun 5, 2014.
So, if I am reading this correctly, the only points which you could recover are:
Jan 31, 2014
Feb 28, 2014
Mar 31, 2014
Apr 30, 2014
May 31, 2014
Jun 30, 2014 + any point in time to your latest WAL backups.
There would be a gap between May 31st and June 5th which would not allow PITR.
We are moving to a new backup solution where we will backup direct to the backup server using a Daily Base backup with pg_start_backup and WAL Log backups every 4 hours.
In regards to retention we are planning on this.
WAL Logs
Daily 4 to 6 times: 60 days retention.
Base Backup
Daily: Mon-Thursday 7 Day Retention
Weekly: Friday 31 Day Retention
Monthly: Last Day of month: 365 Day Retention
So what I am looking for is some clarification on the Base Backups that are 6 months old for example.
Since my WAL Log backups have a 2 month retention I can do PITR from any Base Backup + WAL Logs any day from 2 months back.
However let's say for example I want to restore the Base Backup from 6 months ago, I only have the Base Backups.. Will I be able to recover to that point in time using that Base backup? I have read the PITR documentation however I still struggle to understand this part of it.
Thanks
Jimmy
