I am setting Postgres 9.0 binary replication & Archive backup.
For Archiving on Master, I have these options: a) Copy archive to it's local backup location b) Copy to a share network location also accessible by Standby c) rsync archive files to Standby Server
Due to hard disk space problem on Master, I give up (a). Since I doesn't want to re-setup the base backup too often, the growth in size for archive is huge over time.
For (b) & (c), with PostgreSQL 9.0 binary replication, I understand that it can give this benefit: If Standby can't keep up with Master, Standby can always recover itself from archive (which is created by Master) by having restore_cmd in recovery.conf. But I don't prefer (b) or (c) due to the network complexity problem. Also, to avoid the problem of Standby goes out of sync with Master, I set *wal_keep_segments* to huge value.
But in order to have a complete backup system, I still need archiving. I would prefer to enable Archive on the Standby server. Is it possible to do this since Standby is in Recovery mode (there is always a recovery.conf file available) ?