restoring dumps from crashed drive

[Dave [Hawk-Systems]]

>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.

I am gettin gthe impression that dump is more of a file archiver rather than a
true system backup utility.

>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.

a noted shortcoming on our part.  it wasn't broken so we didn't try to fix
(aside from a few patches), which evidently came back to haunt us when a repair
of this magnitute was required.

>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.

The dissapointment (or misunderstanding on my part of what dump/restore could
handle) is that the hardware was identical, including the new hard drive
make/model.  Absolutely nothing had changed, it just didn't seem up to the task
of restoring over a basic file system.

one of those "never know if it works untill you have a disaster"...  well we had
one, and it didn't.

Dave