David Steele <da...@pgmasters.net> writes: > On 7/25/18 11:09 AM, Andres Freund wrote: >> The problem is that that'll just hide the issue for a bit longer, while >> continuing (due to the O_CREAT we'll not PANIC anymore). Which can lead >> to a lot of followup issues, like checkpoints removing old WAL that'd >> have been useful for data recovery.
> So if a panic is the best thing to do, it might still be good to write > out a copy of pg_control to another file and let the user know that it's > there. More information seems better than less to me. I'm still dubious that this is fixing any real-world problem that is more pressing than the problems it would create. If you're asked to resuscitate a dead cluster, do you trust pg_control.bak if you find it? Maybe it's horribly out of date (consider likelihood that someone removed pg_control more than once, having got away with that the first time). If there's both that and pg_control, which do you trust? regards, tom lane