Re: [Gnumed-devel] examining current schemas

[Horst Herb]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 16:54, Jim Busser wrote:
> Well, is it not important to know for backup purposes? Not only to keep
> backup volumes manageable, but in the event of a computer problem may
> it not be important to be able to restore selectively (e.g. only data),
> and not all of the system and application software.

PostgreSQL is a true *server* system. You talk to the server, not to the 
files.

You NEVER, EVER (!) interact with the data directly on a files system basis.

To backup, you use "pg_dump"
"man pg_dump" will tell you how to backup data only, schema only etc.
"pg_restore does what it suggests, and similarly, consult "man pg_restore" for 
more information

Re backup volumes: I do a "pg_dump" of the whole database once a week, bizp2 
it. and store it remotely. Twice daily, a cron script does another dump,  
diffs the new dump against the old one, and stores the bzip2'd diff remotely 
as well (Patching the last full backup with the diff would allow to fully 
reconstruct the database to the last valid backup). 

Since Postgresql dumps can be *plain text files* (all binary data ASCII 
encoded) this is not only possible, but also the best way to handle it.

The weekly full backup gets burned onto DVD.

Horst