SCaLE 21x — Recovering from Data Loss Despite Not Having a Backup: A Postgres True Story

The 21st instalment of the Southern California Linux Expo, or SCaLE 21x, took place on March 14-17, 2024 at the Pasadena Convention Center. It was my first visit to the conference (and the US West Coast in general) and I was glad to see that it was a wonderfully organised event. For me, there's nothing that beats the community conference ethos and spirit. It was also awesome to see that PostgreSQL got two parallel tracks running throughout the first two days as well as a stand in the Expo hall (major props to PgUS for this!) It feels like we don't get enough conferences where you can walk around expo space and talk to people from Linux distributions and FOSS projects anymore, so I'm glad SCaLE in the US and FOSDEM in Europe are still going strong. Equally awesome was the opportunity to say hi to Jon "maddog" Hall again after 14 years (!) and to thank him for being an inspiration for a career in open source.

For a change, I decided to go with a storytelling format for my talk at SCaLE: Recovering from Data Loss Despite Not Having a Backup: A Postgres True Story tells the tale of how a desperate call on a Friday evening led to an improbable data recovery to be celebrated on Sunday afternoon. Of course, this was all made possible by PostgreSQL's clean and robust design, and there's plenty of technical nitty-gritty in the talk for those that are thusly inclined.

I don't want to spoil too much — you can hear the entire walkthrough in the linked video below — but the gist of it is a company's database was lost after a hard disk crash, and they had no redundancy or usable backups. Under intense time pressure, I had to reconstruct their DB from a bunch of recovered files having no logical directory structure.

Video on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=mdjf9KtW92M

Link to talk slides: vyruss.org/computing/slides/scale21x_recovering_from_data_loss_despite_not_having_a_backup.pdf

On the occasion of the conference, Manning Publications has been kind enough to offer a discount code for my book PostgreSQL Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, so you can use ctwscalex45 to get 45% off for the next 3 months!