On 07/03/2014 12:19 PM, John R Pierce wrote: > 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 ? Yes. And I guess this is probably where the conversation should end. I'm used to the capabilities of Mercurial DVCS as well as ZFS snapshots, and was thinking/hoping that this type of capability might exist in a file system. Perhaps it just doesn't belong there. On 07/03/2014 12:23 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > But, since this is about postgresql, the right way is probably just to > set up replication and let it send the changes itself instead of doing > frequent dumps. Whatever we do, we need the ability to create a point-in-time history. We commonly use our archival dumps for audit, testing, and debugging purposes. I don't think PG + WAL provides this type of capability. So at the moment we're down to: A) run PG on a ZFS partition and snapshot ZFS. B) Keep making dumps (as now) and use lots of disk space. C) Cook something new and magical using diff, rdiff-backup, or related tools. -Ben