Re: Need Help Recovering from Botched Upgrade Attempt

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Craig Ringer wrote:

> I hope you mean cp -aR , because you need those subdirectories if you're
> ever going to try to use the _old copy. Even if you actually did a
> recursive copy, if you really copied the data directories with the DB
> server running and without executing:

Craig,

   According to the cp man page here, 'cp -a' is equivalent to 'cp -dpR'.

>    select pg_start_backup('migrate');
>
> or similar before starting the copy then you're going to have problems
> using that data. You can copy a working postgresql instance's data
> directories, but only if you've enabled WAL logging and you tell Pg about
> it so it can write appropriate markers for recovery.

   This is interesting. I've not read about this before. As I'm the only one
using the databases (primarily for the accounting data) I know that nothing
was changed during the copy operation.

> Right now, you probably need to make REALLY sure you've put a copy of
> those dumps somewhere safe, because I suspect your _old copy will be
> useless. Then use 8.3's initdb on a new, empty directory, verify that the
> config files are correct, and start the 8.3 server.

   Every file from /var/lib/pgsql/ before I started this is on the weekly
backup tape from last Friday night. If need be I can restore from that and
start over.

Thanks,

Rich

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Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |  Integrity            Credibility
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