Original question:
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Looking at the man pages for vrestore, I noticed there was no
flag on vrestore analogous to the -r of restore. It appears
that the only major restore flag for vrestore is -x. In
dump, the -r option causes not only the extraction of files
from the incremental dumps but also the removal of files that
had been removed since the previous lower-numbered dump.
(...details of test of this removed, paraphrase of remainder....)
The results indicated that a "vrestore -x" behaved like
"restore -x" when applied to a series of incremental dumps
and did not remove files that had been removed when
the higher-numbered dumps had been done as would be the
case with "restore -r". "vrestore -x" does not include
an incremental restore option.
I haven't seen how to properly do the vrestores of a series
of incremental vdumps. What am I missing?
-mike
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Michael A. Crowley Director of Networking
mcrowley_at_mtholyoke.edu 216 Dwight Hall, Mount Holyoke College
413-538-2140 South Hadley, MA 01075-6415
fax: 413-538-2331
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~mcrowley
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Summary:
I was surprised that those who responded said it was
not me that was missing something, but vrestore. There is
no equivalent of the "-r" option of "restore".
There were also notes of actual problems with vdump/vrestore.
My opinion is at the very least, Digital should explicitly
put this limitation into the man pages. Since I'm using UFS,
I did not need to use vdump, but it had seemed faster (though
I never did a real timed test) and I had assumed (perhaps
wrongly) that it would be more robust. I also liked the
information displayed by vrestore about the save set. For that
I sacrificed the advantage of the dump program not altering
the last access time of the files. The lack of the equivalent
of the "-r" option of restore is critical.
I am really surprised by this omission. I've long debated whether to
use AdvFS features or not and have stuck with UFS simply because
I hadn't taken the time to work with AdvFS on a non-production
machine to learn about it. The lack of a true incremental
vrestore function precludes further thought here about AdvFS and
will make me return to dump/restore over vdump/vrestore.
Thanks to:
<alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com>
"Huehls, Mark R." <huehlsm_at_INDY.NAVY.MIL>
Also had problems with vdump using more than one tape or if
there was an invalid or null save set.
"Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-884-0646" <tpb_at_zk3.dec.com>
"I will bring this to the attention of the product manager for
the AdvFS and other file systems. I suspect she will agree
that this is a deficiency in the vdump/vrestore utilities, and
that it should be fixed. If she agrees, I will enter this as a
high-priority problem (since it has customer impact) and ask
that it be fixed as soon as possible. However, I suspect a fix
will require redesign of part or all of the vrestore utility's
logic for dealing with file systems."
Martyn Johnson <Martyn.Johnson_at_cl.cam.ac.uk>
Has already registered complaints with Digital about the lack of
the equivalent of the restore "-r" option. It was also noted:
"The handling of renaming is even worse, and can cause files to be
lost. Also vrestore can give runtime errors if a name changes type
(file to directory or vice versa) between the base dump and the
incremental."
Received on Sat Jan 10 1998 - 17:18:39 NZDT