Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com> writes:
> If you where to restore at the file level I would:
> 1) Stop the server.
> 2) Move the existing content of /var/lib/pgsql/10/data/ somewhere else
> just to be safe.
> 3) Copy in the backup.
Yeah. You can't just selectively copy files, because the data files
are dependent on the contents of the pg_xact transaction log; it's
all or nothing.
Also, I don't know what method you've been using to make file-level
backups, but they're really pretty worthless unless you (a) stop
the server or (b) use a filesystem snapshot. Otherwise you're very
likely to have inconsistent data.
regards, tom lane