I have a master+slave set up using asynchronous streaming replication. If I do a graceful (-fast) shutdown of the master, and then promote the slave to master, my understanding is that I should not have any data loss. At that point in order to bring the old master back up as a slave the docs say I should do a base-backup etc....however I've found that simply setting recovery_target_timeline='latest' does allow the old master to start back up as a slave, and everything appears to be happy, all data seems to be synced properly. My question is, is this safe to do? It's a very attractive option as it removes a significant amount of load from the master server for planned switch-overs (maintenance/upgrades/whatever). Thanks!
