Re: [rdiff-backup-users] First restore gone horribly wrong

[Alec Berryman]

begin  quotation of chris young on 2004-09-17 12:52:01 -0700:

> Unfortunately, because Red Hat 9 is officially dead, the server
> facility no longer keeps drive images available to restore
> from. They had to install from rpm's which took them 12 hours to
> complete vs. the two hours they guarantee to restore from a drive
> image. And since my restore attempt corrupted some operating system
> files, I get to do it all over again.

If Red Hat 9 is officially dead, you should look at this as an
opportunity to switch to a supported version of a Linux distribution.
You'll be worse off than you are now if you keep Red Hat 9 on there
and don't have security updates - *when* your machine is compromised,
you won't know what data to trust without quite a bit of work.  Which
distribution is not a discussion for this list, but I'd be happy to
talk to you off-list about it.

> 1. Was my original intent of being able to just restore files over a
> freshly provisioned hard drive realistic? vs. just installing the
> correct software and then restoring the data only instead of the
> apps?

No, you should not have expected to restore application files over
ones from an existing install.  Package management can be a
complicated beast, and blindly overwriting random files will land you
in a lot of trouble.

One option would have been to send the techs a copy of your last good
backup and have them repartition the hard drive and copy the files
directly there without "installing" anything.  You kept very complete
backups, and a competent tech should be able to perform that operation
in much less than the twelve hours it took them to reinstall -
probably a little longer than the two hours they guaranteed for a disk
image because that's basically what you have.  You'd be up and running
with the same system as before, but with a good hard drive this time.

A second and equally valid option would have been to, as you
suggested, reinstall the applications and then restore your *data*.

Alec

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature