Self-hosted Postgresql crashed and no backup! How to restore you DB from raw files?
Here's a great story on why it's good to automate builds, backups and restores, I had the privilege of working on an issue that spelled trouble from the beginning. A long long time ago there was a POC and lots of hype around the product so this POC, which was done manually, turned into PROD. Couple months later the single container running the postgres database crashes and there was no backup. Luckily the container was running in kubernetes and it had a persistent volume with the pgdata directory in it. The container crashed and was not able to come back because of an upgrade done to the DB so the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do here is to protect the raw files by copying them into another directory. In a previous issue I worked on I have seen deployments that even when you use the existing claim they can wipe the data in it and start fresh, so backup the files you have into a compressed folder and create another copy to restore, this way you can at least have a working base.
