Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 08:49:39 -0500 From: Bill Vermillion <bv@wjv.com> To: "Dave [Nexus]" <dave@nexusinternetsolutions.net> Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: restoring dumps from crashed drive Message-ID: <20031027134939.GA35680@wjv.com> In-Reply-To: <DBEIKNMKGOBGNDHAAKGNCEDOGFAC.dave@nexusinternetsolutions.net> References: <DBEIKNMKGOBGNDHAAKGNCEDOGFAC.dave@nexusinternetsolutions.net>
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Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets which will last an eternity, but on Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 08:26 , Dave [Nexus] wrote: > recently had an unfotunate incident where a hard drive crashed > after only 8 months of service. Total loss of data on the drive > even after sending it in to a recovery company. > At first, though annoying, it ddn't seem like a big deal since > we had been religiously dumping the partitions each nigh, and > had a recent 0 level dump as early as the night before. I did > however find that restoring the server to its previous glory > using these dumps wasn't a simple matter. ..... [more gory details deleted-wjv] > We had boot disks, and the thought was to build a base > installation, mount the backup drive(secondary hard drive), > then simply run restore over the various partitions. Some of > the problems we ran into were; - unable to copy various system > files, kernel, etc... - restore being unable to find files and > trees referred to by symbolic link (which at first I figured > would be solved by simply running it twice once the files were > there to be linked to) - and other peculiarities. .... > Aside from the nice dump/restore examples, does anyone have a > real world situation where they could discuss the proceedures > they did to restore a server from backup, assuming total loss > of the primary drive. For the type of hosting we are doing, > having a backup that can be restored within 12-24 hours is > sufficient, which is why we went this route in the first place. > If dump/restore cannot handle a complete server, we have to > look at alternatives. Coming from commercail Unix systems I've never been a large fan of dump restore but having my clients use commercial super-tar programs [called that because they handle devs, and things that used to faily] that also have full verify restore too. Tapes are done automatically and then the tape rewinds and does a bit-level verify of tape againt current HD contents. Complete reports get mailed after each one - with any files that failed - and a notation of how many files were not verified since contents had changed since backup. On the Linux and SCO machines [but not on the BSD] there is also a utility to build boot disks to be able to restore onto a fresh drive from tape after loading only two disks. The program I used [and to keep things clean I must admit I am a dealer for it] is called Lone-Tar. There are free demos at Cactus.com. On the machine as the IPS [a colo facility] I use rsync to backup the important data and var to get the database. But I never get about 2 OS revs behind so I haven't had the problem you expressed. I got spoiled about 1990 using a program from alt souces that did bit level verifies and then the commercial programs started using that. I've seen more than one instance where backups wouldn't restore because the backup failed for some reason or other. None of that helps you now, but I'd strongly recommend a program like that as you can put everything back just the way it was - until you get to the point where new hardware makes a complete identical restore impossible - eg new controllers, NICs, etc. Bill -- Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
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