Re: Incremental backup

Patrick Macdonald <patrickm@redhat.com>

From: Patrick Macdonald <patrickm@redhat.com>
To: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Cc: Martin Marques <martin@bugs.unl.edu.ar>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-02-13T19:54:39Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 
> Patrick Macdonald wrote:
> > Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > >
> > > Someone at Red Hat is working on point-in-time recovery, also known as
> > > incremental backups.
> >
> > PITR and incremental backup are different beasts.  PITR deals with a backup
> > + logs.  Incremental backup deals with a full backup + X smaller/incremental
> > backups.
> >
> > So... it doesn't look like anyone is working on incremental backup at the
> > moment.
> 
> But why would someone want incremental backups compared to PITR?  The
> backup would be mixture of INSERTS, UPDATES, and DELETES, right?  Seems
> pretty weird.  :-)

Yeah, it's a different method of producing a similar outcome.  However, many
companies do not want to be concerned with the management (and space)
of archived logs.  Incremental backup allows them the option of performing 
a full backup and then only backing up the modifications on a regular basis.
When it's time to restore, they'll restore the full backup and then the 
proper sequence of incremental backups. 

Cheers,
Patrick