[NTLUG:Discuss] Catching exit code in a pipe?

[Stuart Johnston]

David Stanaway wrote:
...
> I may end up doing a hot backup of PG since there is less overhead with
> that.
> 
> Thoughts? (Probably more a Q for the postgres list).
> 
> What are folkes doing here for backing up their PG databases with their
> enterprise backup software?

If you want to do replication for a failover server, rather than simple 
data copy, WAL archiving is the way to go.  There has been a lot of 
advancement for this in recent versions.  Postgres 9 will support live, 
read-only spares with streaming replication.

If you just want to backup your data, say nightly, rsync will suffice. 
Use pg_start_backup to ensure your data is consistent.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/continuous-archiving.html