Re: Postgres online backup and restore

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Chris Barnes <cbarnes(at)recognia(dot)com> wrote:

> Sorry if posting twice, wasn’t part of general when sent and didn’t see
> it received by group.
>
> I started an online backup of postgres, tar’d my data folder, copy to usb
> drive in production
> and restored it into my RC environment. Have I missed something important?
>
> Online Backup
>
> psql
>
> checkpoint;
>
> SELECT pg_switch_xlog();
>
> SELECT pg_start_backup('postres_full_backup_June222009');
>
> tar -czvf pgprd01_June22_2009_production.dmp.tar.gz data/
>
> SELECT pg_stop_backup();
>
> Restore
>
> tar –xzvf pgprd01_June22_2009_production.dmp.tar.gz
>
>
>
> When starting the database I receive many errors that look like the backup
> was corrupted.
>

You missed the all-important step of also taking your archived log files to
the remote environment and creating the recovery.conf file:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/continuous-archiving.html
Note section 24.3.3.1

--Scott