Re: automating backups with windows scheduled tasks and pg_dumpall

[SCassidy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

pgsql-general-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 11/15/2007
02:07:07 PM:

> Hello everybody. I'm having a bit of trouble automating pg_dumpall
to do 
> nightly backups. I have a batch file whose contents are below
> 
> SET PGPASSFILE=C:\foo\bar\PG_BACKUP\PGPASSFILE\pgpass.conf
> "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.2\bin\pg_dumpall.exe" -U
foo_postgres > 
> C:\foo\bar\PG_BACKUP\db.out
> 
> Now this file, when I double click on the .bat, works wonderfully.
It 
> sets the variable correctly, reads the pw file with no problem, and
> performs the dump. However when this same bat is built into a scheduled
> task (same username, administrator in both cases), even though the
task 
> claims to have completed correctly, I have no evidence of it running,
> and it certainly isn't doing the backup.

Is the administrator password set correctly in the
task scheduler entry?  If it is wrong, the scheduled job just silently
does not run.

> I'm sure many of you have experience in scheduling
backups in this 
> manner (though admittedly a large number of you are probably using
cron 
> in *nix). Is there anything that jumps out at you? Do scheduled tasks
> have a problem writing to files with > ? I tried an "echo
this is a test 
>  > test.txt" and that didn't run either. What's confusing
is that 
> windows is claiming everything ran fine, in under 5 seconds no less
(my 
> db isn't that big, but it takes longer than that to dump the entire
> thing). Any ideas?
> 
> TIA
> 
> Thomas R. Hart II
> tomhart@xxxxxxxxxxx

I don't run this type of job, per se, from Windows,
but I have run a bunch of others.

Does it say anything useful if you run it from the
task scheduler (right-click on the task, select Run)?  

Depending on how the system is set up, I recently
saw one that refused to run correctly until the "Run As" box
had the system (host) name before "Administrator", as "MYHOSTNAME\Administrator".

One other oddity I ran into recently on one system
only, is that a perl program (.pl extension) worked fine from the command-line,
double-clicked on, etc. but in the scheduled job, I had to put "perl
xxx.pl" for it to work.  Maybe if all else fails, try "cmd.exe
xxx.bat" or "command.com xxx.bat" or similar in the scheduled
task?

It is possible that if you use the schtasks command-line
command to create/run, etc. the scheduled job, that you might get more
or better information (check Windows help for details, or do "schtasks
/?" from the Windows command-line)

Susan Cassidy

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