I have a problem restoring our large database. This has only stared
happening since we moved to 8.1.x

We are currently on 8.1.3.

We perform an over night dump of the database as follows;

pg_dump -Ft $db | bzip2 > $db.dump.tbz

This happens fine, without any errors.

On our backup machine also running 8.1.3 we do the following;

createdb $db
bzip2 -d -c $db.dump.tbz | pg_restore -i -O -d $db

However, after a while we get this error;

pg_restore: [tar archiver] could not find header for file 3765.dat in
tar archive

Our bzip2ed database is 1.2G so it's not small. We also run the same
procedure on a number of other smaller database and have no problems at
all. However, we are now in the unhandy position of having our main
operational database that we can backup, but not restore!

Help.





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Michael Andreasen <michael@dunlops.com> writes:
> pg_dump -Ft $db | bzip2 > $db.dump.tbz
> ...
> pg_restore: [tar archiver] could not find header for file 3765.dat in
> tar archive

Does it work better if you use -Fc format? There was a similar report
recently, which makes me think the tar-format code has got some kind
of problem, but without a test case it's hard to look into it.

regards, tom lane

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I had similar problems with the tar format. 3 smaller databases worked,
the biggest did not. Switching to -Fc fixed it for me.

Sorry for not reporting this.

Harco

Tom Lane wrote:
> Michael Andreasen <michael@dunlops.com> writes:
>
>> pg_dump -Ft $db | bzip2 > $db.dump.tbz
>> ...
>> pg_restore: [tar archiver] could not find header for file 3765.dat in
>> tar archive
>>
>
> Does it work better if you use -Fc format? There was a similar report
> recently, which makes me think the tar-format code has got some kind
> of problem, but without a test case it's hard to look into it.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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> TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ?
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
>
>

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