On Sep 5, 2005, at 6:41 AM, Shanta McBain wrote:
> bash-3.00$ postmaster -D /var/lib/pgsql/data/
> FATAL: database files are incompatible with server
> DETAIL: The data directory was initialized by PostgreSQL version
> 7.4, which
> is not compatible with this version 8.0.1.
> I have been trying to find how to do this in the docs but not had
> any results
> on finding the procedure. There was one mention of backing up the
> db and
> restoring.
This is actually what you need to do. Between major versions (and
some minor versions) the database file structure changes. In brief,
you'll need to start up your old database server (7.4, perhaps
reinstalling it if you deleted it), dump the database (using the
pg_dump for v8), start your v8 database server, and load the dump
into the new database. You can find details at the documentation here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/install-upgrading.html
Hope this helps.
Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com