Brian,
> I'm a definite newbie at db admin - can someone point me to suitable
> instructions and/or a concept of what I should do?
See the book reviews at Techdocs:
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/bookreviews.php
... and buy yourself a nice all-in-one book. Or two!
> I've got a feeling that I should wipe the databases from the test server and
> do a complete restore from a backup - is there a way to this this without
> having to erase each database individually?
Sure:
su postgres
pg_ctl stop
cd <postgres dir>/data
rm -rf *
initdb -D <postgres dir>/data
pg_ctl start
then load from pg_dumpall.
This is a 100% throurough erasure of the server, though ... don't do it if
you're not sure 100% of the data is backed up.
--
-Josh Berkus