dump restore pain and suffering

Kevin Sanders newroswell at gmail.com
Sat Apr 12 02:44:46 UTC 2008


On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Eric <eric at mikestammer.com> wrote:
> Kevin Sanders wrote:
> > I've been dumping and restoring a test system today, and I'm have very
> > little success.  Basically, I've been installing a base FreeBSD
> > 7-RELEASE/i386 system, doing something like dump -0auL -f
> > /mnt/test.root.dump, formating the drive and trying to restore -rf
> > /mnt/test.root.dump.  /mnt is a ufs formated usb drive.  After the
> > dump, I've even done a restore -rNf /mnt/test.root.dump just to make
> > sure it doesn't complain out the dump file.
> >
> > I've read the handbook, found a few articles, googled all the errors.
> > The header dumpdate thing is harmless, the expected next file is from
> > it being a live system, but I'm not ending up with a system that is
> > very usable.  Doing a df, I see that sometimes I end up with a
> > restored slice that is about the same size as my dump file, sometimes
> > less than half.  I know I'm not being very specific with what's not
> > working, but is anyone really using dump/restore and having success
> > with the restore part?  I'm now full of doubt and worry that my real
> > systems are not really backed up.
> >
> > I really wished this worked as easy as falling out of a boat and hitting
> water.
> >
> > Kevin
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
>  i wrote this up:
>
>  http://mikestammer.com/dokuwiki/bsd:dumprestore
>
>  after setting up dump/restore for my backup solution. i used it to migrate
> from old hard drives to a RAID1 setup on a 3ware controller and everything
> went well.
>
>  what errors are you seeing?
>
>  Eric
>

I don't have them handy, but I got the header dumpdate warning, which
I guess is harmless.  Then I would get hundreds of "expected next file
A found B" error.  Sometimes it would suddenly give me an abort [yn],
if you hit n, then you just get another abort [yn] until you give up.

I'll check out your link and give things a few more tries.  I figured
I must be doing something wrong since dump/restore is so highly
recommended as the best choice.

Thanks, Kevin.


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