Re: Copying data files to new hardware?

Evan,

Others can probably answer your question better about copying, but in general we never do that but I think if you use the same arch and major release of postgresql you will be okay.

We have used Slony successfully for all of our database upgrades, server maintenance and database moves over the last several years. Slony 1.2 still supports postgres 8.2. You can set up the new database on the new machine, set it up as a slave and the current machine as a master, replicate the entire database, wait for replication to catch up do a switchover and shut down the old master and uninstall slony. The plus is that you can accomplish what you need with pretty much 0 downtime.

--brian

On Oct 13, 2010, at 10:03 AM, EDH wrote:

> I have a large Postgres DB (1100 GB) that I'd like to move to a new
> physical machine. In the past I've done this via pg_dump & restore,
> but the DB was much smaller then, and I'm concerned about how long
> that would take. The version of pg currently in use is:
>
> PostgreSQL 8.2.5 on x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC)
> 4.1.1 20070105 (Red Hat 4.1.1-52)
>
> What I'd like to know is: if I install the latest 8.2.x release - I
> see 8.2.18 RPMs are available - can I do a straight copy of the
> contents of /var/lib/pgsql/data/ to the new server and start it up?
> Or is dump & restore the only real way to do this?
>
> If I have to do a dump & restore I figure I may as well take the
> opportunity to migrate to 8.4 or 9.0, but I'd rather just get
> everything done as quickly as possible.
>
> Thanks,
> Evan
>
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