On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 01:26:07PM -0500, Jean-Francois Malouin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Last Friday a user managed to remove her entire home directory :)
> so I started an amrecover session (2.5.1p2, client is the server,
> irix-6.5) using the last full backup of the DLE (backed up with
> xfsdump). This DLE while not that big (~70GB) has a lot of small files
> (the uncompressed index file for the full shows ~1M entries). After a
> few hours waiting for the prompt back from amrecover after doing the
> setdisk I aborted the session, started a screen session and did the
> whole thing again, and left work. Later at night I reattached to my
> screen session and still nothing. Did the same thing Saturday morning
> and finally got a prompt back. But while in amrecover I tried to cd
> into the home of the user I got 'no such directory' or similar.
> Checking the index file I see all her files. And doing a 'ls' at the
> root of the DLE only shows part of the directory structure of the home
> disk. To restore her files I had to use the baremetal restore command
> 'dd if=<> skip=1 bs=32k | xfsrestore -i - .' Makes me a little
> nervous. Any one has any idea what might be the problem?
> 

Just a WAG (wild ass guess) of an avenue to explore.

Amanda users and developers certainly have limited experience with
xfs{dump/restore} relative to tar and the traditional dump/restores.
I'm wondering if xfsrestore generates an index that is different in
some way from what amanda is expecting.

A hypothetical example:

I'm pretty certain that tar lists all the directories at the start
of the dump files before listing any of the files.  Don't know about
restore, but lets assume it does.  If amrecover expects this behavior
(don't know that it does) and xfsrestore does not follow it, instead
showing some directories early on then others later, perhaps amrecover
just shows those that are at the beginning of the index "because it knows"
that there are no more directories later in the index listing.

Another hypothetical example, I think directories are indexed with
a trailing "/", so "./tmp/foo/" would be a directory while "./tmp/bar"
would be an ordinary file (no trailing slash).  Maybe xfsrestore
indexes are inconsistant in this behavior.

jl
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
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