Re: replay WAL segments without a "base backup" ?

From: "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov>
To: "Kevin Kempter" <kevink(at)consistentstate(dot)com>, <pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: replay WAL segments without a "base backup" ?
Date: 2009-08-11 15:49:04
Message-ID: 4A814CA0020000250002987F@gw.wicourts.gov
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Kevin Kempter <kevink(at)consistentstate(dot)com> wrote:

> We did a restore with a pgdump

> do have WAL segments

> Is there any way to trick postgres into thinking that it needs to
> play fwd these WAL's?

No. pg_dump SELECTs data at the row level and WAL files are at the
page level. The two techniques aren't compatible in that way.

Theoretically, if you could determine the oids of all the objects in
the old database, through examination of the WAL files, you might be
able to work through the WAL files and recover some data, but it would
be a massive amount of work.

At this point, if you have source documents, logs, or any other
peripheral source of data it is likely to be less work to recover that
way.

In case is is not already obvious, you should never consider that you
have a working backup system without testing a restore onto another
machine.

-Kevin

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