Thread: Another backup q

Hi all,

After a year or so of programming with it, I've become a serious Pg fan.

However, I have one quibble / query.

Many of my applications use large objects to store images, text chunks
etc. etc.  This works very well, and certainly has adequate performance
for anything I've ever tried to do with it.

However, what rather terrifies me is that pg_dump seems only to store the
oid field in the dump, and not the content of the LO itself.

(Oh, I'm using PostgreSQL 6.5.2 at the moment, but will be upgrading into
the 7.x range shortly).

Of course, I could write a program to back up the full content of any
given database, but right now I can't think of a generalised way to do
this for any given DB.

So, does anyone know a solution?  Or am I missing something?  I get
nervous having production DBs which I can't back up.

Regards,
Hal

Halford Dace <hdace@bluedot.co.za> writes:
> However, what rather terrifies me is that pg_dump seems only to store the
> oid field in the dump, and not the content of the LO itself.

You're quite right: pg_dump does NOT back up large objects.
(7.1's pg_dump will, but 7.0 and before don't.)

There is a pg_dumplo utility in current sources, a bit late :-(.
I have attached a copy of it that is modified to work with 7.0,
and I think it will work with 6.5, but I don't have a running 6.5
server to check with.  Test it out and let us know ...

            regards, tom lane