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jpalawagalast Saturday at 8:42 PM1 replyview on HN

Postgres backups are tricky for sure. Even if you have a DR plan you should assume your incremental backups are no good and you need to restore the whole thing from scratch. That’s your real DR SLA.

If things go truly south, just hope you have a read replica you can use as your new master. Most SLAs are not written with 72h+ of downtime. Have you tried the nuclear recovery plan, from scratch? Does it work?


Replies

hnarnyesterday at 9:36 AM

> Even if you have a DR plan you should assume your incremental backups are no good and you need to restore the whole thing from scratch.

"Restore from scratch" can mean a lot of different things, if you have a read replica that you can promote then in relative terms to 72h+ downtime, this should be fairly quick, no?

If you have block-level backups or snapshots, with ZFS for example as someone mentioned, it should also be relatively quick -- although I assume this would make any hypothetical read replica split-brain.