Re: Recover from corrupted database due to failing disk

On 03/11/2016 14:20, Adrian Klaver wrote:
>
> The above does not make sense. You are having to recover because there
> was no backup and now you want to go forward without doing a backup?
>

Hi Adrian, no, I don't want go forward without backups ;)
Actually, the *first* thing I did after the vacuum completed was a full
cluster backup (via pg_dumpall), and I scheduled nightly backups as well.

Problem is this customer does not have another server were backups can
be restored and the entire production database migrated. In short, the
two possibilities I have are:

1) execute the vacuum (done), schedule regular dumps (done) and, if
something goes wrong, recover from backups;

2) execute the vacuum (done), do a manual backup (done), reinit
(remove/recreate) the entire cluster (not done) and restore from backups
(not done).

I strongly prefer to execute n.2 on another machine, so that production
is not impacted while the recovered backup can be througly tested.
If/when the backups are validated, I want to migrate all clients to the
new server (with RAID1 in place), and dismiss the old one.

Unfortuntaly I am working with incredible constrains from customer side;
even buying two SAS disks seems a problem. Moreover, as an external
consultant, I have basically no decision/buying power :|
What I can do (and I did) is to raise a very big red flag and let others
decide what to do.

The good thing is that zero_damaged_pages and vacuum did their works, as
now the database can be dumped and vacuumed with no (apparent) problems.

Thanks.

--
Danti Gionatan
Supporto Tecnico
Assyoma S.r.l. - www.assyoma.it
email: g.danti@assyoma.it - info@assyoma.it
GPG public key ID: FF5F32A8