> I'd run pg_dump | gzip > sqldump.gz on the old system. That took about
> 30 hours and gave me an 90GB zipped file. Running
> cat sqldump.gz | gunzip | psql
> into the 8.1 database seems to take about the same time. Are there
> any tricks I can use to speed this dump+restore process up?
>
> The database contains quite alot of BLOB, thus the size.
You could try slony - it can do almost-zero-downtime upgrades.
Greetings
Marcin Mank