For whatever reason, I seem to be plagued with issues... Whether they're hardware or operating system or a bad combination....I'm not sure yet....and I find myself needing to recover from postgres not wanting to play all too often. In looking at the database data files, I notice that in (for example) a file called /data/db/base/10819/16397, are the contents for one of the relations. The data appears to be correctly stored with NULLs for field seperators, etc. On the assumption that the raw data itself is ok, how do I get that data out? Has anyone written a program to extract data directly from the database data files without using postgres? Are there any caveats in doing so? Darren ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org