This is a little vague...
There is a way to recover the data. Make postmaster come back up. Unless you're talking about postmaster not coming up due to corrupted data files, or a hardware failure.
You do need to use pg_dump at regular intervals. It is common practice to back up data, after all.
Now, instead of being vague, let's see if you can't give us a bit more information about why your postmaster is failing to start. Have you tried starting it manually? For example, running postmaster directly from the command line. Like so:
postmaster -D /usr/local/pgsql/data
Replace "/usr/local/pgsql/data" with the path to your own. If postmaster fails to come up, what errors/warnings did it report?
On 12/5/05, surabhi.ahuja <surabhi.ahuja@iiitb.ac.in> wrote:hi all..
sometime back i had asked a question
is ther no way to recove the database in case postmaster fails to come up??
i dont remember what was there in the log file ... i had seen it sometime back ...for which i dont have the logs
i dint check if by restarting the system the problem would go away?..
do u need to take pg_dump then at regular intervals ?
thanks,
regards
Surabhi