Re: [Dump-users] Best way to consolidate partitions with 'restore'?

[Stelian P. <st...@po...>]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 01:21:30PM -0600, Brent Busby wrote:

> Hello, I am trying to use 'restore' to put the contents of /, /usr, and 
> /opt onto one / partition.  (I also have a /var, /tmp, and /home 
> partition, but I'm leaving those alone and only consolidating /usr and 
> /opt.)  My question regards the best type of restore operation to do this.
> 
> Obviously I'm going to want to repartition and then mke2fs the new root 
> partition, and do 'restore -rv' from tape to put the old contents of / 
> onto the new big root partition.  But then...
> 
> What about /usr and /opt?  The man page says that '-r' should only be used 
> on a pristine volume that has just been formatted.  That would no longer 
> be the case for my root partition now that I've just restored the old / 
> onto it.

Just use restore -r, it will work. You'll get warnings if you have
some name collisions (same filename on several files) but if will
work just fine.

So:
	mkfs /dev/...
	mount /dev/... /mnt/new
	cd /mnt/new
	restore rf /path/to/root.dump
	mkdir usr
	cd usr
	restore rf /path/to/usr.dump
	cd ..
	mkdir opt
	cd opt
	restore rf /path/to/opt.dump

> So I use -x instead?  The man page for restore says the -x option will (if 
> possible) restore "the owner, modification time, and mode."  What about 
> the creation time...last access time...group...hardlinks...special/sparse 
> files?  The author of the man page may have just been omitting such things 
> for brevity, but it gives the impression that a -x type restore is quite a 
> bit less complete than a -r.  Which I shouldn't use (it says) on a 
> filesystem that already has data on it.

You can also use -x.

-x and -r are quite equivalent, the main difference is that -r is
optimised for speed when restoring all the data (-x gives the
opportunity to restore only a part of the data), and -r understand
incremental restores (which doesn't matter for you).

> That leaves -i as the only other option, which I suppose I would use by 
> interactively selecting everything to simulate a -r without whatever nasty 
> effects I would get from an actual -r.

-i will behave exactly like -x.

> I'm so confused.  <g>
> 
> What's the best thing to do here?  How should one best restore an entire 
> volume dump preserving as much of the original metadata and filesystem 
> structure as possible into a subdirectory of an existing filesystem with 
> data on it?  -r?  -x?  -i with everything selected...?

See above.

Stelian.
-- 
Stelian Pop <st...@po...>