Hello, I have read some posts in the pg-admin list. Before I go at it, I thought I'd ask again. Thanks in advance for any pointers. I am trying to see if there are any useful data in an older PostgreSQL installation, for a client. This client, a businessman, not a computer person, has had a few DBAs in the past, and lets assume that all of the DBAs are "gone", unable to help or answer questions. select version(); PostgreSQL 7.2.2 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7) ls -lL /var/lib/pgsql/data/base total 36 drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Feb 13 2004 1 drwx------ 3 postgres postgres 4096 Dec 13 2004 1061329089 drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Feb 13 2004 127833810 drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Feb 13 2004 16555 drwx------ 3 postgres postgres 8192 May 6 00:20 16556 drwx------ 2 postgres postgres 4096 Aug 30 2005 873826677 drwx------ 3 postgres postgres 8192 Jan 2 13:24 945587355 as we can see, there are seven folders under .../data/base. Some folders are symlinks from other file systems, but rest assurred that the actual files are all there. So am I correct in assuming that I should see seven databases? psql -l List of databases Name | Owner | Encoding ---------+----------+----------- veritas | postgres | SQL_ASCII in other words, there is only one visible database. In particular, there are no "template0", "template1", nor "postgres". SELECT datname, age(datfrozenxid) FROM pg_database; datname | age ---------+----------- veritas | -11826501 So the course of action would be, according to what I read in the post, especially those of tom lane in response to those of Michael Beckstette, please correct me: cold backup (stop postgres, and make a copy of the OS files); /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgres start psql -d veritas veritas=# vacuum Mike