Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> This is silly. Why not just turn archiving on and off?

> Not quite. I want online backup, but no archiving. Currently, I have to
> edit postgresql.conf and SIGHUP to "turn on archiving" configuring a
> (hopefully) writable directory, do the backup, edit postgresql.conf and
> SIGHUP again. Not too convenient...

You don't get to count the edit/SIGHUP steps, because those would be the
same for any other GUC.

AFAICS you could get the effect by setting up an archive_command script
sleep 100
exit 1
so that the archiver will do nothing.

BTW, I don't actually understand why you want this at all. If you're
not going to keep a continuing series of WAL files, you don't have any
PITR capability. What you're proposing seems like a bulky, unportable,
hard-to-use equivalent of pg_dump. Why not use pg_dump?

regards, tom lane

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