Re: migrating data from an old postgres version

[Paul Ramsey <pramsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 15, 2016, at 6:55 AM, Melvin Davidson <melvin6925@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Willy-Bas Loos <willybas@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

A coworker is getting a new laptop and he wants to migrate some data from his old one to the new one. So he installed postgres 9.5 on the new one and is asking me how to migrate the data from the old 8.4 database. This database includes postgis.

I asked him to make a network connection so that he can make a dump from the 9.5 machine, but that seems to be tricky for him.

He is inserting a harddrive in his new laptop which has the data directory on it.

So i went to look for a 8.4 installer but it has been EOL for a while now, so i found no official source for that. But i found a 8.4.12 installer on filehorse.com

Now, maybe this is overcautious, but being a linux man myself, i dislike installing unknown software. So is there an md5 signature for that installer around?

Or maybe a more official source for a 8.4 installer?

Cheers,

Make sure to pg_dump -Fc

(note the flags)

so that in case you need to do a hard restore (if you’re going from postgis 1.x to 2.x) you can run the dump file through the special cleaning script.

See postgis documentation notes on “hard upgrade” for full info on doing a clean 1->2 upgrade. 

If he’s already blown away his old environment then yeah, you’re going to have to exactly duplicate it first so you can run 8.4 *and* an old version of postgis (have to match major version numbers) and get a clean dump file out of it.

P.