Message-ID: <4EE00C97.3080905@ringerc.id.au>
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:02:15 +0800
From: Craig Ringer <ringerc@ringerc.id.au>
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To: Walter Hurry <walterhurry@lavabit.com>
CC: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: bad block problem
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On 12/08/2011 08:20 AM, Walter Hurry wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:20:30 +0000, jkells wrote:
>
>> I am relying on identifying and correcting a bad block.
>
> Well, good luck with that. Most of the time you can't. Just check your
> disk, replace it if necessary, restore from your backup and roll forward.
>
> Oh, you can't do that, since you didn't bother to back up. Never mind.

Unless you're using synchronous replication to clone *every* transaction 
on commit to a spare machine, you'll still lose transactions on a 
failure no matter how good your backups are.

Even if the OP was doing nightly dumps, they'd be entirely justified in 
wanting to try to get a more recent dump on failure.

If they're not backing up at all, yes, that was dumb, but they know that 
now. Asking for help isn't unreasonable, and this isn't a stupid "just 
google it" question. They've made an effort, posted useful info and log 
output, etc. Please don't be too hard on them.

--
Craig Ringer