Re: Long term database archival

On 7/12/2006 12:18 PM, Tim Hart wrote:

> Wouldn't you run into driver problems if you tried to restore a 20 year old
> image? After all, you probably won't be using the same hardware in 20
> years...

I can't even find the same hardware I bought "last year". That's one of
the reasons why I use VMware on my laptop. It has a hardware abstraction
layer that presents default XVGA and Soundblaster cards etc. to the
guest OS. When I buy a new laptop, I just install VMware on the new
thing, copy over the virtual machines and fire them up. They don't even
notice that they run on entirely different hardware.

Jan

>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> [mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Jan Wieck
> Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 9:26 AM
> To: Karl O. Pinc
> Cc: Florian G. Pflug; pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org; thm(at)duke(dot)edu
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Long term database archival
>
> On 7/6/2006 8:03 PM, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
>
>> On 07/06/2006 06:14:39 PM, Florian G. Pflug wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>>> Anyway, 20 years is a _long_, _long_ time.
>>
>> Yes, but our data goes back over 30 years now
>> and is never deleted, only added to, and I
>> recently had occasion to want to look at a
>> backup from 1994-ish. So, yeah we probably do
>> really want backups for that long. They
>> probably won't get used, but we'll feel better.
>
> The best way is to not only backup the data. With todays VM technology
> it should be easy enough to backup a virtual disk that contains a full
> OS and everything install for every major Postgres release. Note that
> you would have troubles configuring and compiling a Postgres 4.2 these
> days because you'd need to get some seriously old tools running first
> (like bmake). And 4.2 is only what, 12 years old?
>
> That way, you would be sure that you can actually load the data into the
> right DB version.
>
>
> Jan
>

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