On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Vick Khera
<vivek@khera.org> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Alexander Pyhalov <
alp@rsu.ru> wrote:
> Am I right that on PostgreSQL upgrade to new major version (e.g. from 9.0 to
> 9.1) I'll loose my backups (base backups and wal files will be useless)? So
> to go to past after DB upgrade I had to install old version(9.0), recover
> data and then upgrade DBMS software...
> What is the preferred way to deal with this issue?
useless to start with, unless you shut down postgres while you took
them).
I have used the system level backups and WAL files to clone a database on a second server running the same binaries for PostgreSQL numerous times.
As long as you do a ' pg_start_backup ' before starting the system level file copies
and ' pg_stop_backup ' afterwards, you should be fine.
But you are correct that you can't do that to move from one release to another.
Your pg_dump generated backups will generally be useful. There have
been occasional cases where an old pg_dump won't load into a current
modern postgres install, but I think there were several major versions
gap in those cases.
I recently tried loading a pg_dump of a large database dump file (around 20 GB) from 8.2 into 9.0 and it failed.
However restoring the 22GB pg_dumpall file worked.
--
Mike Nolan
nolan@tssi.com
