Postgres restoration from pg_dumpall: relation does not exist, invalid command \N

Question

I ran pg_dumpall on a Linux server And I'm attempting to restore the resulting file on another linux server, running the same version of postgres (8.1.21-1.el5_5.1).

When I try to restore I get the following errors:

# psql --user=postgres -f pgbackup_dcs.sql postgres
[...]
psql:pgbackup_dcs.sql:10753: ERROR:  relation "sl_event" does not exist
psql:pgbackup_dcs.sql:10754: invalid command \N
psql:pgbackup_dcs.sql:10755: invalid command \N
psql:pgbackup_dcs.sql:10756: invalid command \N
psql:pgbackup_dcs.sql:10757: invalid command \N
psql:pgbackup_dcs.sql:10758: invalid command \N
psql:pgbackup_dcs.sql:10759: invalid command \N
[there are a lot of other errors following this point]

These lines in the dumpfile look like this (first line here is 10753)

COPY sl_event (ev_origin, ev_seqno, ev_timestamp, ev_minxid, ev_maxxid, ev_xip, ev_type, ev_data1, ev_data2, ev_data3, ev_data4, ev_data5, ev_data6, ev_data7, ev_data8) FROM stdin;
1       687653  2010-12-08 11:54:45.669861      36713740        36713741                SYNC    \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N
1       687654  2010-12-08 11:54:55.6757        36713769        36713770                SYNC    \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N
1       687655  2010-12-08 11:55:05.68132       36713796        36713797                SYNC    \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N      \N

Am I doing something wrong with either the dump or the restore? How can I restore the DBs on the new server?

Answer 1

Is there a CREATE TABLE sl_event(....) in the backup? You try to copy content into a table that doesn't exist, it must be missing in the backup or it's created after the copy statement.