WAL is automatically enabled; no action is required from the administrator except ensuring that the disk-space requirements for the WAL logs are met, and that any necessary tuning is done (see Section 29.4).
   WAL records are appended to the WAL
   logs as each new record is written. The insert position is described by
   a Log Sequence Number (LSN) that is a byte offset into
   the logs, increasing monotonically with each new record.
   LSN values are returned as the datatype
   pg_lsn. Values can be
   compared to calculate the volume of WAL data that
   separates them, so they are used to measure the progress of replication
   and recovery.
  
   WAL logs are stored in the directory
   pg_wal under the data directory, as a set of
   segment files, normally each 16 MB in size (but the size can be changed
   by altering the --wal-segsize initdb option).  Each segment is
   divided into pages, normally 8 kB each (this size can be changed via the
   --with-wal-blocksize configure option).  The log record headers
   are described in access/xlogrecord.h; the record
   content is dependent on the type of event that is being logged.  Segment
   files are given ever-increasing numbers as names, starting at
   000000010000000000000001.  The numbers do not wrap,
   but it will take a very, very long time to exhaust the
   available stock of numbers.
  
   It is advantageous if the log is located on a different disk from the
   main database files.  This can be achieved by moving the
   pg_wal directory to another location (while the server
   is shut down, of course) and creating a symbolic link from the
   original location in the main data directory to the new location.
  
The aim of WAL is to ensure that the log is written before database records are altered, but this can be subverted by disk drives that falsely report a successful write to the kernel, when in fact they have only cached the data and not yet stored it on the disk. A power failure in such a situation might lead to irrecoverable data corruption. Administrators should try to ensure that disks holding PostgreSQL's WAL log files do not make such false reports. (See Section 29.1.)
   After a checkpoint has been made and the log flushed, the
   checkpoint's position is saved in the file
   pg_control. Therefore, at the start of recovery,
   the server first reads pg_control and
   then the checkpoint record; then it performs the REDO operation by
   scanning forward from the log location indicated in the checkpoint
   record.  Because the entire content of data pages is saved in the
   log on the first page modification after a checkpoint (assuming
   full_page_writes is not disabled), all pages
   changed since the checkpoint will be restored to a consistent
   state.
  
   To deal with the case where pg_control is
   corrupt, we should support the possibility of scanning existing log
   segments in reverse order — newest to oldest — in order to find the
   latest checkpoint.  This has not been implemented yet.
   pg_control is small enough (less than one disk page)
   that it is not subject to partial-write problems, and as of this writing
   there have been no reports of database failures due solely to the inability
   to read pg_control itself.  So while it is
   theoretically a weak spot, pg_control does not
   seem to be a problem in practice.