[ILUG] dump+restore of linux system

[Conor Daly]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 07:05:44AM +0530 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Walter Faleiro thought:
> Hi,
> I am trying to have a DR plan for my linux system. Currently I have a
> Installation with the partition structure of /  and swap. So I have to take
> only one dump of root.
> Trying to duplicate the sytem, I setup and identical system under vmware and
> copied the root.dump to the / of the vmware system. However I could not run
> restore -rf root.dump successfully as it gave the warnings that most of the
> files existed.

According to 'man restore': 

-r     Restore  (rebuild)  a file system. The target file system should
      be made pristine with mke2fs(8), mounted, and the user cd’d into
      the  pristine file system before starting the restoration of the
      initial level 0 backup. If the level  0  restores successfully,
      the  -r  flag  may  be used to restore any necessary incremental
      backups on top of the level 0.

-x     The  named  files are read from the given media. If a named file
      matches a directory whose contents are on the backup and the -h
      flag  is  not specified, the directory is recursively extracted.
      The owner, modification time, and mode are restored  (if possi-
      ble).  If  no  file  argument  is  given,  the root directory is
      extracted, which results in the entire  content  of  the backup
      being  extracted,  unless  the  -h flag has been specified.  See
      also the -X option below.

It looks to me like -x is the option you need.

OTOH, if you're looking for a full disaster recovery method, consider
mondorescue ( http://www.mondorescue.org ) which generates a bootable
archive that can rebuild your system from bare metal.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at cod.homelinux.org>
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