I had a binary formatted dump file from some unknown developer’s PostgreSQL server. It needed to be restored to a server running an old 8.3 version. When I tried to restore it I got an error:

$ pg_restore -d rc -Fc dump.backup
pg_restore: [archiver] unsupported version (1.12) in file header
$ pg_restore --version
pg_restore (PostgreSQL) 8.3.13

So I probably have a version mismatch, but what where does it get 1.12 from? After some googling I found that 1.12 actually means 9.0 (naturally), so I used the 9.0 version of pg_restore to convert my binary file into a plan SQL file via the -f parameter.

$ pg_restore --version
pg_restore (PostgreSQL) 9.0.3
$ pg_restore -Fc dump.backup  -f dump.sql

Copy dump.sql back to 8.3 server

$ psql rc -f out.sql

Worked fine. I’m sure I’ve moaned about the lack of options in pg_restore before, but this helped restore my faith in it a little bit