On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 02:23:56PM -0400, Nick Brockner wrote:
> Hi All.
> 
> I am new to amanda, and maybe I just don't understand how it works, but 
> here is my problem:
> 
> I have a remote machine that I back up over my network.  The backups and 
> everything go fine.  I am doing a disaster recovery test today, and it 
> went all wrong.  Very, very wrong.  I have a DLE in disklists for "/" of 
> this remote host.  The problem is that on this host, I have several 
> different partitions mounted at /usr, /var/ /home, . . . you get the 
> idea, and when the backup of the "/" DLE happenes, empty directories are 
> created for all the mountpoints! (I am using GNUTAR).  So, when I tried 
> to do a bare-metal restore, it clobbered my base install by overwriting 
> all the mountpoints with empty directories, and I couldn't restore the 
> rest of the partitions because the base install was hosed.
> 
> Can anyone help me / tell me what to do in order to get tar not to 
> create these empty directories at the other mountpoints?

When I think of bare-metal restoration, I think of going to an empty,
probably partitioned and formatted drive.  In that case, restoring
the root DLE followed by the /usr, /var, ... DLEs would achieve what
you seek.

When the backup of your root DLE was made, /usr, as a mountpoint, was
an empty directory in the root file system.  So that is what was
restored.


amrecover restores to the state as of a particular time/date.
If I ask to recover a single directory from a week ago,
and I do the recovery into the original directory, any files
created during the week are deleted because it is restoring
the state of the directory to that of a week ago.  Same with
ownership and permission changes I might have made during the
week.  For this reason it is oft said here, do not do amrecover
into the original location, but instead into an empty directory.
Then check the files and move/copy to the ultimate location.

I don't know if you had used exclude directives to eliminate
the mountpoints from the root DLE would have changed anything.
Perhaps if they were not even included in the backup, they might
be totally eliminated upon recovery rather than left as empty
directories.  I just don't know.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)