Backups Restores and PITR nowdays
Its been almost a year since 9.4 was released, it included many nice features, but the one that changed my day to day administration was replication slots. In OmniTI , we use something called OmniPITR a lot, OmniPITR could be called a wal management suite, it can be used to wal ship, to replay wals to clean up wals when they are not needed and it can be used for backups. Usually the way I use it is to first set up streaming replication to a replica, and on top of streaming replication setup wal shipping replication, the reason is simple, i want to have all the wals around in case i lose the slave and i didn't really like the wal_keep_segments approach. Backups are usually being taken from a slave in order to reduce load from the master. Briefly, OmniPITR does this by sending a pg_start/stop_backup to the master, puts a pause removal file on the slave so wals are kept and makes 2 tar.gz files for the base backup and the wals. Usually i have a backup server keeping all the wal files