Tony Nelson wrote:
I am ok, because I have a dump from last night, and wal since then.
Dumps made with pg_dump are easy to restore from. But they're fixed in time: there is no applying WALs to them in order to update them. Anything that's happened to the server since then you can't add.
If you made a filesystem copy of the server using pg_start_backup/pg_stop_backup, and you save all of the WAL files after the backup began, that's also useful. You can store from that backup and apply all the WAL that's happened since then.
Can I drop/create/restore from this dump? Or should I restore from last nights full and apply the WAL?
If last night's backup with a filesystem one done with pg_start_backup/pg_stop_backup, and you have WAL since then, I would favor that set as likely to work fine. But it sounds like what you have might instead be a pg_dump backup and some WAL files; you can't apply the WAL to such a dump. Whatever you do, you want to make a full filesystem copy of the server's data directory--with the server shutdown--before you do anything else. It's possible to recover from page errors and extract the available data using the right data recovery techniques, especially if there's a pg_dump available too; we offer some services in this area. But if any serious changes are made to the database before we get to it, odds of successful recovery can drop fast.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance": http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/books -- Sent via pgsql-admin mailing list (pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-admin
