Getting "[archiver] unsupported version (1.13) in file header" when running pg_restore

Mark Swardstrom picture Mark Swardstrom · Mar 2, 2018 · Viewed 87.9k times · Source

I just upgraded to postgres 10.2 on mac os which matches 10.2 on heroku. I'm trying to download a copy of the database and restore it locally. Before the upgrade the restore would work fine.

I run

pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -d database_name backup.dump

but I am getting this error:

pg_restore: [archiver] unsupported version (1.13) in file header

The database appears to be working OK. It's a rails app and I upgraded the pg gems. I can run rake db:create and db:migrate just fine.

Answer

jumichot picture jumichot · Mar 2, 2018

You need to upgrade your local postgres to get the last security patch from the 2018-03-01, like Heroku did the 1st march. You need one of the last releases 10.3, 9.6.8, 9.5.12, 9.4.17, and 9.3.22.

The security patch can be found here https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1834/.

It seems the patch modified pg_dump, that's probably why we can't use pg_restore anymore without that patch for the dump of Heroku (with the patch applied).