You have to have the database running to use pg_dump.
To dump the databse: pg_dump name_of_database > file_to_save_to
copy the file_to_save_to to your server.
To restore the database: if the database doesn't exist then create the database. createdb -T template1 -E encoding_type name_of_database
Then use psql name_of_database < file_to_save_to
You're done.
There are options in postgresql to create the database, but this sometimes causes conflicts, depending on your schema.
Tim.
Tony Dietrich wrote:
On Thursday 13 Jan 2005 22:15, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 13:23 -0500, Scot L. Harris wrote:
I think what you are looking for is the
pg dump
or
pg dumpall
commands.
Fantastic. After some more thrashing around, it seems those are commands to be typed in at the BASH shell, not inside psql... that had me fooled for a little while. But I eventually managed to find "pg_dump", "pg_dumpall" and "pg_restore". Great, says I.
Nope. I've been through the pg_dump man page backwards and forwards and have tried lots of iterations of the command. While the PostgreSQL service is started, and I can access the database properly with psql, pg_dump runs for less than one second and then exits. No error is given, no output results, nothing.
This is FC3, everything is updated, and I've tried setting every useful parameter I can think of, even setting host, user, and -W to force a password prompt. Nada, zilch, zippo. No logs anywhere I can find, either. /var/log/pgsql is entirely empty.
You missed a step the original reply stated. TURN OFF the PSQL server before dumping. A running server hooks into the db and blocks the dump.
If you can't shutdown the server to do the dump on a production machine, you are limited to SQL to backup the data, assuming the remote server is available through the network. Look up how to use PSQL as a SRDBM.
Since surely I'm not the first one to want a database backed up or transferred to another server, anyone who got this working have any suggestions?
Thanks,
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
