Re: hardware failure - data recovery

Rick Gigger <rick(at)alpinenetworking(dot)com> writes:

> To make a long story short lets just say that I had a bit of a
> hardware failure recently.
>
> If I got an error like this when trying to dump a db from the mangled
> data directory is it safe to say it's totally hosed or is there some
> chance of recovery?

Why don't you try dumping just the critical tables using pg_dump -t?

Also perhaps use psql and try looking up in pg_class for the damaged
tables by OID. You may be able to drop just a few tables and then
dump the DB normally. This assumes the damaged table(s) are
non-critical...

I suggest you stop Pg first, take an FS backup of the entire cluster
before this so you cahn try various approaches if needed.

> pg_dump: ERROR: could not open relation 1663/18392/18400: No such
> file or directory
> pg_dump: SQL command to dump the contents of table "file" failed:
> PQendcopy() failed.
> pg_dump: Error message from server: ERROR: could not open relation
> 1663/18392/18400: No such file or directory
> pg_dump: The command was: COPY public.file (vfs_id, vfs_type,
> vfs_path, vfs_name, vfs_modified, vfs_owner, vfs_data) TO stdout;
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rick
>
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