Moving a PostgreSQL database from one server to another

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 16:37, Tony Dietrich wrote:

> 
> 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.

pg_dump is the 'hot' database backup tool.  It should be used with
the server running. If the destination is the same CPU type you
can get away with copying the files under /var/lib/pgsql/ instead,
in which case the server must be shut down.  You do have to tell
it which database to dump and run it as a user with permission
to connect, but there should be some kind of error message if
it fails.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com