Message-ID: <4B805376.80705@FastMail.fm>
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:26:14 -0500
From: "Richard O. Hammer" <rhammer@FastMail.fm>
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To: PostgreSQL admin list <pgsql-admin@postgresql.org>
Subject: upgrading, but learned about pg_dumpall too late
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Hello,

I hope someone can tell me how to recover my database tables.  I recently 
upgraded to a new Linux server.  First I saved a copy of my 
/var/lib/pgsql/data/*, which was created with PG version 7.4.  On the new Linux 
server I have PG version 8.1.11.

But now, trying use my old tables, I discover that I should have saved the 
tables with the pg_dumpall command before I abandoned the version-7.4 Postgres 
server.  Unfortunately I did not know about pg_dumpall.

So now I'm wondering if there is a way I can read and update my version-7.4 data 
directory with my version-8.1 postmaster.

Here is one thing I've tried:
  bash-3.2$ pg_ctl start -D /var/lib/pgsql/old/data
  FATAL:  database files are incompatible with server
  DETAIL:  The data directory was initialized by PostgreSQL version 7.4, which 
is not compatible with this version 8.1.1

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thank you,
Rich Hammer
Hillsborough, N.C.