My old iMac G5 died recently. I had a PostgreSQL instance running there, and I kept backups. But when I went to restore them in my newer Macbook Pro, I realized that I couldn’t do the restore due to byte endianness differences.
Is there any compile flags that I can pass to PostgreSQL’s configure script to use a reversed endianness on Intel, allowing me to restore from backup, then do a SQL dump, and restore it on a default endianness instance?
Actually, I don’t even know if I need to recompile PostgreSQL, perhaps there is some setting that someone can point me to to allow me to do the restore?
No. If your backups were made with pg_dump they’d be endian-independent, even if you used the binary format.
If you took a copy of the data directory (with the database shutdown, or using pg_start_backup()/pg_stop_backup()) you need to restore on a machine with the same endianness. You’re probably best off importing it in a virtual machine with the same endianness somewhere, then dump from there with pg_dump and reload on your new machine.
If you took the backup from disk without shutting down PostgreSQL, the same basic thing holds, except you’re also going to have to try to recover from a corrupt backup. That can be little work or hundreds of hours or more work depending on how much traffic you had on the database, and how lucky you are.