Re: How to increace nightly backup speed

[Glen Parker <glenebob(at)nwlink(dot)com>]

Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 19:13 +0200, Andrus wrote:
> > I need to create nightly backups to separate computer over internet from 8.1 
> > server
> >
> > I tried to run pg_dump to make backup using command
> >
> > "..\pg_dump\pg_dump.exe" -i -Z9 -b -v -f "C:\061127 mybackup.backup" -F c -h
> > 81.50.12.18 -U myuser -p 5431 mydb
> >
> > but this takes 4.5 hours to complete.
> >
> > How to increace backup speed ?


I agree to use online backups.  But, I bet the majority of your backup 
time is spent compressing your data (-Z9).

The solution I'm currently using (both with online backups and pg_dump) 
is to copy all the data to an alternate volume uncompressed, then 
compress it (nice gzip -1).  This allows the backup itself to happen as 
quickly as possible, and then the compression can run for awhile without 
having a large IO impact on the main data volumes. I worry about how 
long the initial copy/dump takes, but not so much after that.

-Glen