Repairing Broken Binary Replication in PostgreSQL 9.0 I have a binary replication that was stopped for so long that the WALs were removed and as a result, it ended up being old. I'm trying to reestablish the replication and the best way I've found so far is following the steps on the PostgreSQL wiki:  


Issue select pg_start_backup('clone',true); on master  
rsync everything except for pg_xlog from master to slave  
Issue select pg_stop_backup(); on master  
rsync pg_xlog  


But the database is too big (300 GB), my connection is not really amazing (like 800 kB/s) and the files in base keep changing. So I was wondering if there's a more optimal way to do this.
Database files and transaction logs tend to be very fat , so compression makes a big difference try rsync -z or compress the data directory beforehand. Try with  xz (former lzma) you wont believe the compression ratio for postgres files.