Re: restore a pg_dumpall only breaks

Marc Fromm <Marc(dot)Fromm(at)wwu(dot)edu> writes:
>> A dump from 9.2 is no sure thing to restore into an 8.1 database; there may be SQL syntax in it that 8.1 doesn't understand. Have you checked for errors during the restore?

> After the last successful database restore from the pg_dumpall file this is displayed on the ssh session.
> psql:pg_dbs.bkp:1029100: \connect: invalid connection option "-reuse-previous"

Ah. That option was introduced quite recently as part of a security fix.
It's no surprise 8.x doesn't recognize it.

You could probably work around this by using pg_dumpall with -g to just
dump roles and tablespaces, and then pg_dump'ing individual databases
separately. A mite tedious and error-prone. Or maybe use "sed" to strip
out the -reuse-previous options from pg_dumpall's output. But really this
is the best answer, because 8.x is long out of support:

> I figure the best thing to do is to upgrade postgres 8.4 (not 8.1 as previously mentioned) to 9.2 on this centOS6.4 server, so it's version matches the other server. I searched for some time on how to do this and every tutorial does it a little different and each has different steps that the others do not have. Is there a clear step by step procedure to do this upgrade?

If you're working with locally-built copies of Postgres, I'd say just
follow the recipe given in the pg_upgrade man page. If you are working
with someone's packaged version of Postgres, the packager may have
provided a script or something for upgrades, in which case follow their
recommendation. Either way it's a good idea to make a backup beforehand
in case of disaster.

regards, tom lane