Re: Emergency backup question. - Mailing list pgsql-novice

From Josh Berkus
Subject Re: Emergency backup question.
Date
Msg-id web-510107@davinci.ethosmedia.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Emergency backup question.  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-novice
Danni,

> > Greetings Basically I have a problem here. I lost my linux system
> due to
> > hard drive corruption I managed to back up my
> /var/lib/pgsql/data/base
> > directory to an ordinary tarball before I redid the system. Is
> there any
> > way to use this data as a backup?

Not really.  As Tom said, without some of the other files, a backup of
just the /base subdirectory is nigh on useless.

If, however, this was mission-critical information requiring many hours
of your time to recover, you can recover a certain amount of your data
by reading the tables directly using a text editor.   However, this is
very labor-intensive and tends to only allow you to recover the integer,
numeric, and short VARCHAR fields; the rest of the fields often get
compressed.

-Josh


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