Verify Back up exists

[apwine]

I am about to wipe my laptop to uninstall Vista and install XP Pro. I have run the Backup Utilities program for PostgreSQL .....successfully I believe (the dos window goes away like it’s suppose to). How do I verify that all of my data has backed up correctly and that it is stored correctly? Then do I just copy that file or files to an external hard drive?

Thanks!!

[ptrack pat]

There really isn't a way to verify that the backup is good or not other than restoring it which would wipe out the database. So if it was bad, then you are screwed because the good database would now be bad.

So, on top of saving this .backup file I would also recommend you ZIP/backup the entire c:\program files\postgresql\8.2\data folder so that in case the backup file is no good you still have the data files that can be used to recover the database.