The following bug has been logged online:

Bug reference: 2273
Logged by: Bernhard Neuhauser
Email address: cybernd (AT) cybernd (DOT) at
PostgreSQL version: 8.1.3
Operating system: WindowsXP
Description: pg_restore fails with huge file (custom compression)
Details:

I tried to clone my db.
So i dumped it into a file using the custom compression. (Used pgadmin3 for
this purpose)

There was no warning - the operation succeeded.
Afterwards i tried to recover it to a second postgresql instance.

The restoration command:
pg_restore.exe -i -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres -d mydb -a -t mytable -v
"D:\db.backup"

It is impossible to restore tables at the end of the file. The thrown error:
"[custom archiver] error during file seek: Invalid argument"

Maybe its not easy to fix the bug, so a simple warning will be a huge
improvement. (warning: pg_dump with custom compression and huger db sizes
will possible fail on windows or so).

Im not sure where it fails. I think it just fails to find the start of
tables beyond a specific threshhold. But it seems like pg_restore was able
to recover my hugest table in the middle of the file, so i think that
pg_restore was able to recover data beyond 2gb. Im sorry, but im not sure if
the last recovered table also breaks the 4gb limit.

(Its easy to reproduce the behavior - tried it twice)

hth
Bernhard Neuhauser

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