How can I make barman to perform only full backups and ignore any WAL files?

[Garagoth]

Hi! I have (among several other databases) a database that, by itself, is not that big, but amount of changes on that DB reaches several GB per minute.

I would like to be able to do a full backup of that database every day, but skip all WAL files (it is OK to recover DB from up to a day in the past in this case) However, currently setting both archiver and streaming_archiver to off causes this:

WARNING: No archiver enabled for server 'lab_cluster14'. Please turn on 'archiver', 'streaming_archiver' or both
WARNING: Forcing 'archiver = on'

Is it possible at all using Barman? How could I achieve this?

[martinmarques]

It's not possible to do that with barman. Something to keep in mind is the fact that you'll at least need the WALs between the start of the backup and the end of the backup, so you have consistency (this would be equivalent to running pg_basebackup with option -X stream). And another thing is, even if you are able to take backups this way, which you can with pg_basebackup, you won't be able to perform any kind of PITR. For PITR you need to have the full set of WALs from when the last backup before the time of recovery, until the point of recovery. Could you tell us what it is that you are trying to achieve? You could just have a script that runs pg_basebackup and puts the backup in a tar formated output. But you'll have the drawbacks mentioned above, which IMO are critical when you end up with the need to recover from accidental deletion of data

[Garagoth]

Hi! This is a database where I can rebuild what happened during the day by other means, what is important is database state at the end of the day. Also, that database is then (after each backup) restored to test database, to the exact time when full backup was taken. The database size is about 600 GB (and will grow), most of the data is never edited after end of day, so ideally de-duplicated (incremental) full backups would save a lot of space (like 80%). At the same time, WALs from one day can be as big as database itself, and that, combined with retention period, amounts to quite considerable backup space requirements. This is an attempt to reduce disk usage while sacrificing some restore flexifility, business approved :-)

[martinmarques]

Have you tried using compressed WALs? You might be surprised by how much you can compress the WALs

But at the end, that is not a supported architecture for barman

[Garagoth]

I have compressed WALs, and only thanks to that WAL size is around 200-500 GB daily... it is a quite busy database. I do not want PITR for this database. I could keep Barman config with active=false, temporary turn it on, get one wal, do backup with --wait option, set active-false again. Maybe it would work? Still a bit painful to manage it this way, so I was hoping for some other way. Feel free to close if nothing can be done here.