On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Vick Khera <vi...@khera.org> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Alexander Pyhalov <a...@rsu.ru> wrote: > > Am I right that on PostgreSQL upgrade to new major version (e.g. from 9.0 > to > > 9.1) I'll loose my backups (base backups and wal files will be useless)? > So > > to go to past after DB upgrade I had to install old version(9.0), > recover > > data and then upgrade DBMS software... > > What is the preferred way to deal with this issue? > > Your file-system based backups will be useless (but they probably were > useless to start with, unless you shut down postgres while you took > them). >
I have used the system level backups and WAL files to clone a database on a second server running the same binaries for PostgreSQL numerous times. As long as you do a ' pg_start_backup ' before starting the system level file copies and ' pg_stop_backup ' afterwards, you should be fine. But you are correct that you can't do that to move from one release to another. Your pg_dump generated backups will generally be useful. There have > been occasional cases where an old pg_dump won't load into a current > modern postgres install, but I think there were several major versions > gap in those cases. > I recently tried loading a pg_dump of a large database dump file (around 20 GB) from 8.2 into 9.0 and it failed. However restoring the 22GB pg_dumpall file worked. -- Mike Nolan no...@tssi.com
