Hi everyone,
I have my PostgreSQL 9.5 server running on a VM instance on Google Compute Engine (Google Cloud Platform) on Debian Jessie (8.3), and I have another dedicated VM instance that, every night at 3.00, takes a snapshot of the whole disk, without stopping the PG instance itself.
Snapshots are stored and kept by Google in an incremental way, and we keep the last 2 weeks of history.
The question is: Keeping all two weeks worth of pg_xlog files, I don't think I still need a periodic pg_basebackup to perform PITR, do I?
You need a base backup to apply your wals to. So long as you have one from after the start of your wal stream, you should be good for PITR. That said, replaying 2 weeks of wal files can take a long time. For that reason alone, it might well make sense to have more than a single basebackup snapshot.
