Jonathan Vanasco <postgres@xxxxxxxx> writes: > I'm running postgres on a virtual server > I was wondering if there were any known issues with moving the data directory to another mounted partition / filesystem. You can put the database directory anywhere you want. Obviously, it has to be trustworthy storage, and in that respect I'd caution against soft-mounted storage. There's a disaster story in the PG list archives somewhere (quite some time back, maybe 10 years ago) about somebody who had their database on NFS storage. One day the NFS server was a bit slow to mount after a reboot and didn't come up until after the postgres server start script had launched. This was one of those "helpful" vendor-supplied start scripts that would automatically run initdb if the data directory wasn't there. So it started up, looked at $PGDATA and didn't find anything, and launched initdb. initdb faithfully checked that $PGDATA was empty (still true) and set about creating files. Right after that, the NFS server finally comes online ... and now initdb is scribbling over the system catalogs of the live database. Needless to say, that did not end well. Disconnecting storage from under an already-running postmaster will possibly spoil your day too, although it should be reasonably survivable as long as it wasn't the WAL logs you dismounted. So, while you can do what you like, it behooves you to think about possible failure modes anytime you choose to put the database directory (or a tablespace directory) on any dismountable storage. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
