Re: reuse data in existing data directory

Thanks Richard,

in fact I just had to run the manual install of postgres and define the
data directory to my existing one and everything was restored....great, but
I preferred to ask rather than erasing my data ;)

Thanks

Peter

On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:24:41 +0000, Richard Huxton <dev(at)archonet(dot)com>
wrote:
> On 16/03/10 12:02, Peter Schmidtke wrote:
>> Dear PostGreSQL users,
>>
>> I have the following problem. I have a system with several partitions
>> (openSuse Linux 11.1). Far what is important related to this question :
>>
>> - 1 system partition (where postgres is installed)
>> - 1 data partition (where the postgres data directory is lying)
>>
>> my system partition got messed up and I prefer to reformat and reinstall
>> the system without touching to the data partition. Thus I have to
>> reinstall
>> postgresql, but I don't know if I would be able to recover my data. Is
>> that
>> possible? How can I reintegrate all my ancient databases?
>
> If the data partition contains *all* of your PostgreSQL data files
> (pg_clog, pg_xlog etc) then it should be simple enough.
>
> 1. Take a backup of your PG data (can't hurt).
> 2. Re-install SuSe, make sure you have the same version of PostgreSQL
> (if you had 8.3 before re-install that 8.3 again).
> 3. If your PG files are in the standard directory then you should see an
> error saying initdb refused to run.
> 4. That's it - it should all just work.
>
> --
> Richard Huxton
> Archonet Ltd

--

Peter Schmidtke

----------------------
PhD Student at the Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Group
Dep. Physical Chemistry
Faculty of Pharmacy
University of Barcelona