Re: Long term database archival

On Jul 7, 2006, at 1:19 AM, Csaba Nagy wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 20:57, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> What is the best pg_dump format for long-term database
>> archival? That is, what format is most likely to
>> be able to be restored into a future PostgreSQL
>> cluster.
>
>> Should we want to restore a 20 year old backup
>> nobody's going to want to be messing around with
>> decoding a "custom" format dump if it does not
>> just load all by itself.
>
> Karl, I would say that if you really want data from 20 years ago, keep
> it in the custom format, along with a set of the sources of postgres
> which created the dump. then in 20 years when you'll need it, you'll
> compile the sources and load the data in the original postgres
> version... of course you might need to also keep an image of the
> current
> OS and the hardware you're running on if you really want to be sure it
> will work in 20 years :-)

I've been burned by someone doing that, and then being unable to
find a BCPL compiler.

So don't do that.

Store them in a nice, neutral ASCII format, along with all the
documentation. If you can't imagine extracting the
data with a small perl script and less than a days work today
then your successor will likely curse your name in 20 years
time.

Cheers,
Steve