Fwd: Long term database archival

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marco Bizzarri <marco(dot)bizzarri(at)gmail(dot)com>
Date: Jul 12, 2006 9:03 PM
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Long term database archival
To: "Karl O. Pinc" <kop(at)meme(dot)com>

Long term archival of electronic data is a BIG problem in the
archivist community. I remember, a few years ago, a paper describing
the problem of historical (20+ years old) data which were running the
risk of being lost simply because of lacking of proper hardware.

What I would suggest is to explore the problem trying to search first
with experience and research already done on the topic. The topic
itself is big, and it is not simply a matter of how you dumped the
data.

A little exploration in the archivist community could produce some
useful result for your problem.

Regards
Marco

On 7/6/06, Karl O. Pinc <kop(at)meme(dot)com> 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.
>
> Mostly, we're interested in dumps done with
> --data-only, and have preferred the
> default (-F c) format. But this form is somewhat more
> opaque than a plain text SQL dump, which is bound
> to be supported forever "out of the box".
> 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.
>
> Is the answer different if we're dumping the
> schema as well as the data?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Karl <kop(at)meme(dot)com>
> Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
> -- Robert A. Heinlein
>
>
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--
Marco Bizzarri
http://notenotturne.blogspot.com/

--
Marco Bizzarri
http://notenotturne.blogspot.com/