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Comment by dgregd | Hacker News Reader

> What's wrong with WAL backup?

I use PG for 10 years and I never needed incremental backups. But if someone asked me about it then I would respond that the PG has no incremental backups.

So WAL backup is not well known or documented in my opinion. An average db admin needs a tool which will generate incremental backup as a single file named like dbname_20160926.sql

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Barman[1] gives you something better than incremental backups actually. It sets up the backup server as a database slave via PG's built-in replication. It gives you point in time recovery with the nicest CLI of any backup tool for any DB I've ever used.

If you think backup tools are a minus for PG, I guess you've never used barman. Easy as pie and has saved my bacon several times when CASCADE DELETE wrecked a few dbs for me due to coworkers futzing around.

[1] http://www.pgbarman.org/

> If you think backup tools are a minus for PG, I guess you've never used barman

You are right, I've never used barman. But I have streaming replication configured manually. Generally I am quite happy with PG backup tools.

However this discussion made me to think about pg_dump deficiencies. WAL backup is for whole db cluster. But how do I incrementally update one db? E.g. one prod db to my dev environment.

Indeed, that is something that WAL files don't work for. There aren't a lot of great answers for that. I generally will restore a point in time snapshot somewhere and then dump out that entire db to restore via sql or whatnot.

>So WAL backup is not well known or documented in my opinion

What? It is the standard backup method clearly explained in the docs.

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