On Jul 7, 2006, at 1:19 AM, Csaba Nagy wrote:
On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 20:57, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
Hi,
What is the best pg_dump format for long-term database
archival? That is, what format is most likely to
be able to be restored into a future PostgreSQL
cluster.
Should we want to restore a 20 year old backup
nobody's going to want to be messing around with
decoding a "custom" format dump if it does not
just load all by itself.
Karl, I would say that if you really want data from 20 years ago, keep
it in the custom format, along with a set of the sources of postgres
which created the dump. then in 20 years when you'll need it, you'll
compile the sources and load the data in the original postgres
version... of course you might need to also keep an image of the
current
OS and the hardware you're running on if you really want to be sure it
will work in 20 years :-)
I've been burned by someone doing that, and then being unable to
find a BCPL compiler.
So don't do that.
Store them in a nice, neutral ASCII format, along with all the
documentation. If you can't imagine extracting the
data with a small perl script and less than a days work today
then your successor will likely curse your name in 20 years
time.
Cheers,
Steve
