dump/restore over ssh question

Elliot Finley efinleywork at efinley.com
Fri May 20 11:38:36 PDT 2005


From: "Andy Firman" <andy at firman.us>
> On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 04:28:40PM +0100, Xian wrote:
> > To restore the filesystems:
> > Boot from a rescue disk and create the partitions of on the disk. I've
never
> > smashed anything badly enough to need to work out how to do this. At
least
> > the partitions were still there.
>
> Well this is more complicated than it seems.  First of all, using the
> fixit mode from 4.11-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso and trying to use
> disklabel -e does not work.  It gives this error:
> disklabel:  /mnt2/stand/vi: No such file or directory
> It turns out vi is located at /mnt2/usr/bin/vi and one has to set
> EDITOR=/mnt2/usr/bin/vi for disklabel to work.  Is that a bug?
> This also happens when I boot off disk1, enter fixit mode, and use
> the live filesystem with disk2.
>
> It is very easy to dump filesystems for backup, but it is not easy to
> restore filesystems.  (I am trying to do this all over ssh...not tape)
> It is probably just better, easier, faster, to backup all your
> data and config files (rsync -e ssh -avp ...) and in case of disk failure,
> replace the disk, install fresh OS, then restore data and config files.
>
> What do you think?

Why not just create a bootable disk *as* your backup.  That's what I do.  I
run it once a week and then also backup every night to a disk based backup
server.  If my system disk fails, I just need to but off of my backup disk
and then restore my nightly backups.



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