restoring dumps from crashed drive

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To: <freebsd-isp@freebsd.org>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 08:26:49 -0500

recently had an unfotunate incident where a hard drive crashed after only 8
months of service. Total loss of data on the drive even after sending it in to a
recovery company.

At first, though annoying, it ddn't seem like a big deal since we had been
religiously dumping the partitions each nigh, and had a recent 0 level dump as
early as the night before. I did however find that restoring the server to its
previous glory using these dumps wasn't a simple matter. The server was a 4.3
installation with the odd patch here and there to fix critical problems that
came up since then. Since it was a production server, it was alway too risky to
cvsup and rebuildthe entire world and risk having various data applications fail
because of changes.

We had boot disks, and the thought was to build a base installation, mount the
backup drive(secondary hard drive), then simply run restore over the various
partitions. Some of the problems we ran into were;
- unable to copy various system files, kernel, etc...
- restore being unable to find files and trees referred to by symbolic link
(which at first I figured would be solved by simply running it twice once the
files were there to be linked to)
- and other peculiarities.

Bottom line is we ended up ditching it, installing a 4.8, cvsup to 4.9, then
rebuilding the server by hand, and copying user data over. We are still trying
to get database files restored which are problematic because of the massive
changes in the various MySQL and PostgreSQL since previous versions.

Aside from the nice dump/restore examples, does anyone have a real world
situation where they could discuss the proceedures they did to restore a server
from backup, assuming total loss of the primary drive. For the type of hosting
we are doing, having a backup that can be restored within 12-24 hours is
sufficient, which is why we went this route in the first place. If dump/restore
cannot handle a complete server, we have to look at alternatives.

Appreciate any comments or feedback on this.

Dave

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• Previous message: Lucas Valdeón: "Re: proftpd or pure-ftpd (virtual users / domains)"
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• Reply: Artyom V. Viklenko: "Re: restoring dumps from crashed drive"
• Reply: David Wolfskill: "Re: restoring dumps from crashed drive"
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