"Oscar Serrano" <oserra@fondos.net> writes:
> Suddenly in the directory where I have all the tables, now there is about
> 1000 files with names like this:
> [ and a bunch of apparently-duplicated entries in system catalogs ]
Looks pretty messy :-(. What version are you running?
I hope you have a fairly recent pg_dumpall backup, because otherwise
you are likely to be in trouble. If the backup is new enough that you
can just restore from it without losing much, then I'd recommend just
initdb and restore. If you have newer data than what is in the backup,
but the schema is still the same, you could probably use pg_upgrade to
recover the system tables from the backup and then move your current
user data into the database. (It looks like the trouble is just in the
system tables, so your user tables are most likely OK.)
If you want to try the pg_upgrade method, make sure you have the latest
pg_upgrade script (from 7.0RC5, current nightly snapshot, or direct from
CVS server) --- previous versions are known to have problems in
multi-user databases. Then, follow the man page's directions for
pg_upgrade, except don't bother trying to make a "pg_dumpall -s" dump
from your corrupted database; instead use your last good backup file
as the input script for pg_upgrade.
regards, tom lane