PostgreSQL Continuous Archiving & Point-in-Time Recovery in combination with netbackup

Question

I have the following setup:

• OS: CentOS
• PostgreSQL 12
• Netbackup 8

What I want to achieve: Configure continuous archiving with the possibility of Point-in-Time Recovery

My current idea:

1. Generate a pg_basebackup every day at midnight and put the generated files in a folder outside of the data folder
2. Delete the files older than the created backup from the pg_wal folder
3. Create a Netbackup of the VM

With these three steps I should be able to make a PITR every day starting from the last base backup until the upcoming base backup, and my pg_wal folder will never grow too much. Also the usage of the internal archiving is not required.

Somehow this sounds very simple and I would like to ask if I am missing something here?

Answer 1

There is one crucial thing wrong here: you never, ever delete files from pg_wal. You need to configure archive_mode = on and set archive_command so that PostgreSQL archives transaction log files when they have been completed.

Much simpler than creating a pg_basebackup on a local disk and then backing that up would be to backup the data directory directly. You have to get PostgreSQL into backup mode first (pg_start_backup) and end backup mode once you are done backing up files (pg_stop_backup). See the documentation for more.