Don, so Postgres doesn't have anything like Oracle's RMAN utility.
But, is there any way at all to do hot physical backups using archived
redologs (the "write ahead log" for Postgres, I think) the way you can
with Oracle? Or any word on when/if the Postgres folks plan to
support that?
(RMAN makes doing hotbackups easier for Oracle, but it's not
necessary - for example,
Unix Backup & Recovery
describes the
oraback.sh
script which does hot backups without using RMAN.)