Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!wa3wbu!john From: john@wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Restoring system from tape backup (how ?) Keywords: cpio microport Message-ID: <476@wa3wbu.UUCP> Date: 2 Feb 88 01:43:40 GMT Organization: WA3WBU, Marysville,PA Lines: 50 I had a problem this past weekend when restoring my system from tape. Heres the scenerio: I'm running Microport 2.3U and have an Everex external 60MB tape drive. I wanted to re-do my file systems and change a few partition sizes around. So I did a total system backup via cpio like so: find . -depth -type f -print | cpio -ocv > /dev/mt/rmt0 It proceeds with the backup as per usual. After this, I boot from my boot.floppy and re-run fdisk and divvy and re-create the file systems. I then reload runtime.1 & runtime.2 which loads just enough to boot back from the hard disk. I boot from the hard disk. At this point the system has virtually nothing on it, just enough restored from release media to enable the restore from tape (this ok?). So I restore the files with this: cpio -icvdum < /dev/mt/rmt0 And away it goes. I have switches to cpio set to create directory if needed, copy even if exsisting file is older, and preserve previous file modification times. All appears well. Now the problems start!! Upon rebooting the system after the restore I find News wont work, LP spooler wont work and I cant even write files to my own home directory. The problem is that during the restore, every directory that cpio needed to create was created with a permissions of 755 and an owner ROOT, group SYS (not the permissions, owner, group of the original directory). This wreaked havok with News. Also, directories that were empty were omitted entirely. This caused problems with LP where /lp/class and /lp/requests are usually empty. And....... I notice CPIO does not backup special files like the ones in /dev, etc. Question: How can I get cpio to backup special files as well as regular files ? What went wrong with the directory creation ? I read in the docs that as long as super-user did the backup, the restored directories should have the same permissions as when backed up. And... what needs to be done to enable empty directories to be re-created with the proper permissions. Is what happened to me a problem with Microport CPIO or is there some procedure Im not following for backup/restore ? Im basically interested in being able to restore a blank disk back to the running configuration. Any help/suggestions are appreciated! John -- John Gayman, WA3WBU | UUCP: uunet!wa3wbu!john 1869 Valley Rd. | ARPA: wa3wbu!john@uunet.UU.NET Marysville, PA 17053 | Packet: WA3WBU @ AK3P