Re: Database recovery

Christian Schröder wrote:
> we have a PostgreSQL 8.2 database on an xfs filesystem. By mistake the
> first blocks of this filesystem were overwritten. An xfs_repair
> reconstructed the superblock and also found many orphaned files and
> directories. Actually, all we have on the filesystem now is in
> "lost+found". ;-)
> When I look in "lost+found" I have many files that *could* be database
> files, but since the original name of the files is unknown I cannot
> tell for sure. I have found a directory that looks like the original
> "data" directory, with stuff like "postmaster.log", "pg_hba.conf" and
> even subdirectories "base", "global" etc. in it. I have been able to
> start postgresql from this directory, but when I tried to access the
> most important database I got a message that the database directory
> could not be found. Indeed, this directory is missing in "base", but
> there is a chance that some of the other files might be the original
> content of this directory.
> Is there any way to find out which of the files is really a postgres
> data file? Or even for which database? Although the database file and
> page layout are described in the manual, I could not find an exact
> description of the file format, e.g. any magic numbers at the
> beginning of the file.
Hmmm, no idea? :-(

Christian

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