Producing Bad Dumps

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 09:52:30AM -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:

> I use the following flags to create a level 0 dump:
> 
> dump 0ufaL /home/backups/backup /dev/DISKPARTITION
> 
> The dump appears to run just fine. /home/backups/backup is a
> pipe to a remote system that fills a regular file from the pipe.
> 
> 	Everything seems to run well at the time and the dump
> file has gigabytes of data in it. I can restore many files from
> it and all seems well.
> 
> 	Today, I practiced restoring a whole system from one of
> these dumps and used the following command:
> 
> restore -u -fx FILENAME
> 
> It prompted for the volume number which is 1 (100% of the dump)
> and then I entered none when prompted for the next volume.
> 
> 	That was about an hour ago and it is still spewing out
> the names of thousands of files, many of them OS-related such as
> /usr/src/xx which were not being modified or created at the time
> so if any files should be there, these should.

Probably you did not want the -x or -u, but instead wanted to do
  cd /MOUNTED_EMPTY_PARTITION
  restore -rf DUMPFILENAME

But, I am not sure because it is hard to understand why you chose -xu.

////jerry

> 
> 	Any idea as to what I did wrong?
> 
> 	At this point, it is not certain whether the dump is bad
> or the restore is bad, but it isn't exactly confidence-en spiring
> if the system in question was to melt.
> 
> 	No file systems filled up and the pipe isn't taken down
> until the dump has finished, at least that is what I believe to
> be the case.
> 
> 	Any suggestions are welcome.
> 
> 	Actually, for this test, I pretended that a directory
> on the system called scratch is / so I am just testing the
> ability to restore what should be everything under /
> before actually trying this on the real / because after that,
> you must rebuild the system from CDROM for a proper test.
> 	Thank you.
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