Hi Daniel: On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 5:30 PM, Daniel Begin <jfd553@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > How big? According to PgAdmin my personal database is about 2TB... I do not know what pgAdmin reports, I was thinking in how bick a dump ( using -Fc, which compresses on th fly ) is, to see wheter you can restore. > How critical? Well, about a year of work!-) Well, my fault. I know its valuable, or you wouldn't be bothering with all of this. By critical I meant if you can take it offline for the time needed to do a dump/restore, but I suppose after all this time you have a problem with this approach. > Francisco wrote: "just did a stop/cp/change pgdata /restart, I suppose windows must have comparable ways" > This is what I have just tried when I got “Could not read symbolic link “pg_tblspc/100589”: Invalid argument” I do not know windows, but I suppose you must check this error, I mean, check the link in the original and the copy and see if they look right ( ls -l does it in linux, I suppose the windows ls or whatever tool you use to list a directory in windows can do it too ). > Considering both drives are identical, could an image backup have done the job properly instead of a plane copy? I know the builtin windows copy ( in cmd ) was not good copying complex setups. cp for windows did it in my times, but as I say it was a long time ago and windows is too complex for me. I also do not know what an image backup is. In Linux I've done a sector-by-sector copy ( only on nearly full disks, otherwise cp is faster ) to a bigger disks and the OS didn't notice after the swap ( and neither Postgres ). On identical disks, a sector copy should work, but I wouldn't be surprised if windows kept some kind of info and need some other adjustement. Anyway, what I mean is a normal copy should suffice, but windows is complex and a normal copy is very difficult to make ( at least for me ). But the error says it is getting a problem with a readlink. The first thing should be checking it, it is simple in Linux, you just do ls l on both of them and you are done, you even have a readlink program to use in scripts, I assume windows has a similar command, just check it. Given the error i would bet for an EINVAL which normally is due to the named file ( pg_tblspc/100589 ) not being a symlink, the windows equivalent to ls -l should tell you that ( my thought is somehow it is a directory, or a plain file, but you should be able to find it easily ). I cannot tell you more, also bear in mind I abandoned windows in 2001 an use pgadmin only for seeing queries in a grid, I do all my admin tasks with psql/pg_dump/pg_restore, so I cannot tell you zilch about windows or pgadmin specific stuff. Regards. Francisco Olarte. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general