Re: Space for pg_dump

[Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:57 AM, SHARMILA JOTHIRAJAH
<sharmi_jo(at)yahoo(dot)com> wrote:
> --- On Tue, 3/31/09, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> From: Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>
>> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Space for pg_dump
>> To: "SHARMILA JOTHIRAJAH" <sharmi_jo(at)yahoo(dot)com>
>> Cc: "General postgres mailing list" <pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org>
>> Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 11:49 AM
>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 7:57 AM,
>> SHARMILA JOTHIRAJAH
>> <sharmi_jo(at)yahoo(dot)com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > Hi,
>> > How much space does a pg_dump usually take?
>> > One of my databases is 600GB.... How much  space do I
>> need to dump this?
>>
>> Note you can find out by doing:
>>
>> pg_dump dbname | wc
>>
> Yes...I could find the space used after creating the dump.
>
> But I need to pre-allocate some space for storing these dumps (there are other databases too that needs to be dumped). So Im trying to find a space estimate ....
> Do you have a rough estimate of pg_dump in general... like 1/4 th of the database size or something like that...I just need a rough estimate for now

It's hard to say.  Why can't you RUN the example command on each db
and see for yourself?  It doesn't create a backup, per se, it just
creates one and hands it to wc to see how big it is.