migration still a problem

Thanks for helping. I made some notes below.
I'm new to mailing lists and am not sure of the correct protocols so I
appreciate any suggestions on how to respond.

At 04:27 PM 4/11/2002 -0700, you wrote:
Jourdan,

> I am trying to restore a database from a gzipped file: i believe that
> backups were done as complete files (not partial) under Postgresql
> 7.0.3. Pg_restore does not recognize the ungzipped file
> filename.psql. The command, psql -d database -f filename.psql,
> restores it partially, but with numerous errors and the database is
> mostly empty. As I understand, this command restores the file to an
> existing database, so I had to create one with the original filename.
> But I don't know if the newly created database must have the exact
> same permissions, ownership, etc. as the original.
> I am told to install the earlier version of Postgresql to restore,
> but that seems to be complicated. Even if that works, how can the
> restored database be migrated to a newer version of Postgresql?
> Does anybody out there know about this kind of thing?
> Thanks for any help.

Well, there's two possibilities:
1. The backup file was damaged somehow. Opening it in a text editor
with "word wrap" turned on can be enough to screw up the file (I once
had a client do this -- they even opened it in MS Word, which wrecked
the file compeletely).

I don't think this happened, as I only gunzipped the file.

2. Your errors have something to do with users & permissions. Do you
have any idea whether the file was created with pg_dump or pg_dumpall?
This might be it. k
Don't know. Doesn't the psql extention mean something, since pg_restore
does not recognize it?

I dont know what needs to be done here. I have the original username &
password and one of the first errors when rebuilding is related to
username. I am not clear on just how one is to set up a Postgressql
superuser or what needs to be done to create the base database. I have no
problem creating the database, but perhaps I need to do it as the username
with password as originally used.
I do have pgAdmin2 installed on W2K. The database is on a FreeBSD machine
Then, also, I am told that I need the plpgsql language installed. This was
done successfully on the current installation of Postgresql 7.2.
first 2 errors: parser: parse error at or near üsername"
Relation "category_category_id_seq" does not exist
Then there is a ton of ":linenumber: invalid command \N errors and a number
or "ERROR: parser: parse error at or near "n" (n = various numbers)
I have an error file with all the errors.

3. You have some of the issues with pg_dump which have been resolved
between version 7.0.3 and now.

Take a look at what the *specific* errors are that you are getting when
you try to restore using psql. This will give you a much better idea
what's going wrong.

-Josh Berkus