Massive table bloat

Our dba quit last week leaving me with an interesting problem.

We have a table currently using 33gb worth of space for only 152mb worth of
data because of bad processes or autovacuum not being aggressive enough. I
was able to confirm the size difference by doing a create table as select
along with a second test of restoring the table from the dump file to a dev
machine.

There is a very large list of foreign key relationships that I'm not
including for the sake of brevity.

The database version is 8.4.1

The old DBA had said that vacuum full would take days to complete, and we
don't have that much of a window. So I was considering using the to force
a full table rewrite. In testing on a dev machine it only took about five
minutes.

I do not have as much hands on experience with postgres so I wanted to get
thoughts on what is considered the proper way to deal with this kind of
situation.

Any comments would be welcome.

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