May 2018
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
30h 25m
English
One advantage of file-based WAL archiving is that it works in a push mode, without requiring inbound access to the database server. On the other hand, streaming WAL archiving has the advantage of transferring WAL as soon as it is produced, without waiting that the 16 MB WAL segment is completed, which usually results in little or no data loss even in the event of a disaster.
Summing up, neither choice is superior to the other one, so we opted for documenting both. PostgreSQL ships a command-line utility called pg_basebackup, which uses the streaming replication infrastructure to carry out steps 4 to 6, as reported previously.
As an alternative, it is simpler than using rsync and issuing pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() ...