Re: Recovering a messed-up database

"Reuven M. Lerner" <reuven(at)lerner(dot)co(dot)il> writes:
> To make a long story short, I thought that the site administrator was
> making regular backups, and that I was running pg_dump every night.
> Unfortunately, neither assumption was quite right. The administrator
> was using rsync to back things up, and accidentally reversed the
> parameters a few nights ago, thus wiping out the contents of our PGDATA
> directory. Well, not *all* of PGDATA. Among the things that were
> partly or completely saved are PGDATA/base. But PGDATA/global, as well
> as pg_clog, pg_xlog, and so forth are completely gone.

You're hosed :-(. Without pg_clog you can't trust any of the data
files, at least not for recently-modified data. If it's possible to
rebuild without depending on the files you have, I'd definitely counsel
going that way.

regards, tom lane