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[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org> writes:

> On Mon, 9 Jun 2003, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
>> Some mistakes, like deleting /etc (I did that once) aren't really
> Even this is recoverable with a local system backup.

I'll qualify somewhat.

This machine was the one that had its power pulled in the middle of
installation and is a direct ancestor of what I'm using right now.
I'd been fooling around with rsync as applied to making images of /etc
and using it to "push" changes out to a LAN.  I was making copies
using various options to /tmp and then deleting them.  Unfortunately
my fingers slipped and I deleted the *real* /etc.

At this point the system started giving "you don't exist" types of
messages and nothing I could do would enable me to get root and copy
the files back from /tmp (where there was a perfect copy, thanks to
rsync).

Okay.  So at this point I would have pulled out my rescue disk and a
tape and done a restore *but* the machine had no CD drive, and not
even a proper PC display unit attached, and so on.  Eventually I took
the disk and its adapter card (this was a SCSI system, hence the lack
of CD drive) to my place of ork and effected a restore there by
recompiling the kernel, booting from the other drive, and mounting my
SCSI disk.

There isn't much you can't recover from if you can get your disk into
a working machine.

> If you backup to a different partition on the same harddrive then a head
> crash will finish you (unless you take additional backups) but it does
> protect against most problems - even filesystem corruption.

Linux will frequently kernel panic if the filesystem is badly corrupt,
and when I see a system panic I start to worry that it's nose-monkey
time.

> Using dump or xfsdump I run the following schedule:
>
> day 0		level 0 (full) dump
> day 10	level 1	dump
> day 20	level 2 dump
> other days    level 5 dump

Is there any reason the other days have a level 5 dump instead of a
level 3?  Are you leaving yourself space to do lower-level dumps on,
say, days like 13 and 21?

jason
-- 
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                                 http://www.panix.com/~jasonp

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