Re: How do I recover from>> pg_xlog/0000000000000000 (log

Mike Nolan wrote:
>>On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 03:49:04PM -0700, pw wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I set up a cron job to pg_dump and gzip every hour and
>>>dump any backup gz files older than 1 week.
>>
>>Huh ... be sure to keep some older backup anyway! There was just
>>someone on a list (this one?) whose last two weeks of backups contained
>>no data (a guy with OpenACS or something).
>
>
> Also, if you don't routinely test your backups every now and then,
> how can you be sure they'll work when you NEED them to?
> --
> Mike Nolan
>
>

Hello,

If vacuumdb and pg_dump don't work
then I have bigger problems than just a hardware burp.

It's just like any other (MS incuded) software. You have to trust
it until it proves otherwise.
I've seen oracle go south because of hardware, etc. too.
At least I'm not spending $30,000 for the adventure.
I don't get any more satisfaction for the $30 grand
than rebuilding from a backup anyway.

If I really felt paranoid about it I could have a
test server set up and make a cron job that scps
the current backup over and builds
a database from it. Then queries every table for the
last updated record and compares it to the local server.
A days work tops.

I'm pretty sure the current backup method is OK though.
It can even move the database backup off site in case the
place burns down.

In the case of the fellow with no data, It's difficult
to say whether that's real or not.
I moved a DB over to another machine and had to open the tar
file that came from pg_dump, edit the 'restore.sql' in several
places, and run the script manually so I could watch the error logging.
All the data was there, it just wasn't going through the
COPY command properly (path issues). Also, the proceedural language
that I was using for a trigger needed to be installed by 'postgres'
user *first* before I was able to make part of the script work.
It's pretty easy to forget all the schema stuff in a
database over time.
Did that guy look in the '.dat' files to see if there
was data?

Peter