Kieren Scott <kierenscott@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry it's a bit of a what-if scenario. I can envisage
> encountering a situation in the future whereby we hit this
> problem, and I was trying to put a plan in place for how to deal
> with it.
Oh, OK. I was afraid you had actually *hit* this situation and were
being coy. No need to apologize for contingency planning! :-)
Hypothetically, in the situation where the stall originated with the
application of files from the archive, fixing that end would and
clearing files from the archive directory (or moving or deleting old
ones if they were applying cleanly and just sitting there after
application), would allow the archive process to resume copying and
cleaning up files on the source database.
If someone panicked and deleted files from the pg_xlog directory,
well, the first thing is to try to make sure nobody does that. You
might be able to turn off archiving and get the server to come up.
If not, start by making a complete copy of your data directory and
all of its subdirectories while PostgreSQL is stopped, because you
may wander into trouble and want to try again. If you can't start
with archiving turned off, you might want to look at this:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/app-pgresetxlog.html
Of course, you want to monitor closely to ensure your backups are
running correctly so you never need any of the above advice. ;-)
-Kevin