Is it possible to restore a Postgres database when only having access to the table files under $PGDATA/base/<db_oid>
? The system catalogs are empty.
Background
Somebody with sudo
executed an rm -Rf
under /var/lib
. Random files where deleted, but not the ones of the database I am interested in. Postgres would not start, even after I restored several files/directories by hand. So I created a new $PGDATA
and copied the database files in, hoping that Postgres would automatically read them. Apparently, Postgres relies a lot on its system catalogs to maintain links between what is on disk and what the user sees.