On 10/06/2011 03:06 AM, Leif Biberg Kristensen wrote:
I seemingly fixed the problem by stopping postgres and doing:

balapapa 612249 # mv 11658 11658.old
balapapa 612249 # mv 11658.old 11658

And the backup magically works.

Woooooo! That's ... "interesting".

I'd be inclined to suspect filesystem corruption, a file system bug / kernel bug (not very likely if you're on ext3), flakey RAM, etc rather than a failing disk ... though a failing disk _could_ still be the culprit.

Use smartmontools to do a self-test; if 'smartctl -d ata -t long /dev/sdx' (where 'x' is the drive node) is reported by 'smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sdx' as having passed, there are no pending or uncorrectable sectors, and the disk status is reported as 'HEALTHY' your disk is quite likely OK. Note that a 'PASSED' or 'HEALTHY' report by its self doesn't mean much, disk firmwares often return HEALTHY even when the disk can't even read sector 0.

I strongly recommend making a full backup, both a pg_dump *and* a file-system level copy of the datadir. Personally I'd then do a test restore of the pg_dump backup on a separate Pg instance and if it looked OK I'd re-initdb then reload from the dump.

--
Craig Ringer

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