Re: Restoring databases using only data/ dir

Hi,

Thank you for the quick reply. Here is a more detailed account of what
is happening...

Well, we were hosting our Postgres boxes at a co-host place. The machine
crashed and has no dumps of any databases on there. However, luckily, I
do have a tar backup of the pgsql directory, which contains all the
files in data/.

Now, the old server was running postgres 7.1. So I installed the same
version in house and moved over the data/ directory from the backup tar
file to the newly build data directory:

# mv backup/pgsql/data/global /usr/local/psql/data/
# mv backup/pgsql/data/base /usr/local/psql/data/
# mv backup/pgsql/data/pg_xlog /usr/local/psql/data
# su - postgres

Postgres starts up fine after the move, but then I cannot actually
retrieve any databases:

$ pg_dump wdcx > wdcx
pg_dump: couldn't find the pg_database entry.
There is no entry in the 'pg_database' table for this database.

Odd thing is, the database is in there and Postgres knows it:

$ createdb wdcx
ERROR: CREATE DATABASE: database "wdcx" already exists
createdb: database creation failed

How do I retrieve all the databases from the directory? I hope I am not
doomed...

Thank you very much.

Afra

> Restoring the *entire* data directory should work.
>
> It seems to me that there's a great deal you haven't told us; if you
> want useful help it's better to err on the side of too much info,
> not too little. For starters, what happens when you try to pg_dump?
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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