Speak at Bengaluru Systems meet-up

While restoring a crashed PostgreSQL 16 cluster by hand, my restore reported success and my rows were still missing. Two things were off in my attempts: my recovery target was 12 microseconds before the last commit, and the cluster followed a different timeline than I expected. This talk is a walkthrough of that one real restore: pg_basebackup, continuous WAL archiving with archive_command, recovery targets, and what a timeline actually is. I show how the rows stayed absent until I corrected the recovery target and timeline, and the exact settings that brought them back. I’m a student learning these internals myself - this is one demonstrated drill on a small EC2 lab you can rebuild, not a comprehensive internals lecture.

Bio: I’m Saravana Priyan, a Product Testing Intern at Nokia in Chennai, and a final-year AI and Data Science student. I learn backend engineering by running small failure and recovery experiments on my own EC2 lab and writing them up on AWS Builder Center, including this experiment. This work is a personal project and does not represent my employer.