On Thu, 13 Feb 1997, Dirk Kastens wrote:

> the leader of one of our departments has some
> serious questions about the functionality of ADSM.
> He has some very special needs, that I think ADSM
> is not able to fullfill.
> I want to be sure and would be glad, if you could
> answer the following question:
>
> 1. Does ADSM support "delete on restore"?
> He wants to analyze the following scenario:
> His system disk crashed, he installs the new system from CD.
> Before the crash he deleted /usr/lib/sendmail and used
> /usr/local/sendmail instead. After the new installation
> the old /usr/lib/sendmail exists again. Now he starts an
> ADSM restore of the /usr file system. Will ADSM delete
> the now existing /usr/lib/sendmail, because it's not
> on the backup?
> How can he restore the system to exact the same state
> as it was before the crash?

I am amazed how few people (and backup software vendors) recognize
the need to restore a filesystem to its last known good state as a
valid and important requirement.    :-(

But I don't think you need to reinstall your system from CD before
restoring your system from ADSM. I have successfully restored root
filesystems after booting the system from miniroot. Advantage: no
need to reinstall the system from CD, root filesystem quiescent
during restore. I tested this procedure only on SGI IRIX clients and
I'm curious how successful users of other platforms are with
this setup.

The only question that is still open at the moment is that the
ADSM backup client does not seem to check whether a disk is still
alive before starting to back it up. If run an incremental on a
mounted user file system that has died, it seems that all files
in the backup are marked inactive. If this is trum, it is very bad,
because you will have to "resurrect" all files that were intentionally
deleted by users but have not expired. Any comments?

Sincerely,   Michael Fink

   Dr. Michael Fink +-----------------------------+------------------------
        EDV-Zentrum | Universitaet Innsbruck      | Tel: +43(512)507-2311
 Computing Services | Technikerstrasse 13         | FAX: +43(512)507-2944
--------------------+ A - 6020 Innsbruck, Austria | Michael.Fink AT uibk.ac DOT 
at
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