"Matthew T. O'Connor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 14:51, Andrew Dunstan wrote: >> Maybe use an option which you would disable on Windows to copy the files >> instead of hardlinking them.
> I think this would be a good feature even without hard link problems. > If I am a paranoid admin, and I can afford the time and disk space > required, I would want to keep a complete copy of my database, even > after the new server is up and running. That's a good point --- if the upgrade appears to work, but when you actually start the new postmaster there's some incompatibility that results in corruption of your user table files, then you're screwed under a hard link approach. Even though your old $PGDATA directory structure is still intact, the files it contains are corrupted. (Even if they're not corrupt, but you hit some other reason for backing out the update, you probably can't, because very very soon your old WAL and clog will be irretrievably out of date compared to the data files.) Okay, so we want an option to copy even if we could hard link. No problem. Alternative thought: just recommend that if possible, people take a filesystem dump of their old PGDATA directory after stopping the old postmaster. This would be sufficient for retreating to the prior version if needed. It might or might not be slower than copying all the files to a new PGDATA ... regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]