On 7/2/2014 12:53 PM, Lists wrote: > I'm trying to streamline a backup system using ZFS. In our situation, > we're writing pg_dump files repeatedly, each file being highly similar > to the previous file. Is there a file system (EG: ext4? xfs?) that, when > re-writing a similar file, will write only the changed blocks and not > rewrite the entire file to a new set of blocks? > > Assume that we're writing a 500 MB file with only 100 KB of changes. > Other than a utility like diff, is there a file system that would only > write 100KB and not 500 MB of data? In concept, this would work > similarly to using the 'diff' utility... you do realize, adding/removing or even changing the length of a single line in a block of that pg_dump file will change every block after it as the data will be offset ? may I suggest that instead of pg_dump, you use pg_basebackup and WAL archiving... this is the best way to do delta backups of a sql database server. -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast