Re: Re: database restoration problem- data became incorrect caused by incorrect date in the server

Thanks for the ideas

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Grittner [mailto:Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov]
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2010 8:03 PM
To: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org; Khangelani Gama
Subject: RE: [ADMIN] Re: database restoration problem- data became incorrect caused by incorrect date in the server

Khangelani Gama <Khangelani(dot)Gama(at)ucs-software(dot)co(dot)za> wrote:

> the backups we have uses pg_dump command. The automatic
> backup dumps file happen daily and gets saved in a certain
> directory

No off-site copies or archives to fall back on? If not, my ideas
are:

(1) I hope you made a file copy as soon as you found the problem.
If not, stop the database and make one immediately. If the old
versions of the rows haven't yet been vacuumed away, it might be
possible to fish some or all of the corrupted data out of the
database. This is very tricky work, though, and you might want to
contract with an expert. (I don't do that anymore, but there are
several good companies with people who do.)

(2) Are there any source documents you can fall back on to
reconstruct the data?

(3) Is there any way to "reverse" the particular calculations or
operations which mangled the data?

Once you do get upgraded, you should look into Point In Time
Recovery (PITR) backups. Had you been running this, you could have
replayed the transactions right up to the moment of corruption.
Well, if you kept a base backup from before the corruption and all
the WAL files since that base backup.

-Kevin

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