[WBEL-users] steps to help recover data from a crashed system? (boot drive crashed, need to get data from data drive)

[Jeff O'Brien]

khaqq wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 11:19:34 -0500
> "Jeff O'Brien" <jobrien at ntisys.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> After each copy over, I did rm -rf  the savedir.  Both methods seem to 
>> work and retain permissions.
>>     
>
> It could be that tar is aliased -p in your /etc/profile or .bashrc . Last
> time I checked, tar did not preserve permissions by default (I was using
> a Gentoo boot CD to decompress a stage install on the hard drive).
> Uncompressing the stage without the -p resulted in totally mangled
> permissions on the system.
>
> khaqq
>   
Nope no aliases, and this is a fresh wbel4 install, and the remote host 
was wbel3.  Never used a gentoo boot cd though, so maybe thats why.  I 
guess it depends on your *nix version.  Reading # man tar, the -p 
operator def says to preserve permissions, but I havent had trouble with 
it before, as long as I had the passwd/group/shadow files copied over 
first.  Moral of the story is:  test everything before you rely on your 
backup method.

This got me thinking as Im actually sitting here playing with the 
knoppix cd... the command with -p and without yielded the same results, 
the file permissions stayed the same but the owner became whoever ssh'd 
the files over to the remote machine( knoppix booted wbel4 system to 
wbel3 remote host).

Scott brings up a good point, a raid setup makes all the difference in 
this case.  If so Dale, please give us some more info like:  
raid/controller model, some system specs, etc...  And also I dont 
recommend RAID-0 if this is a server.  At least RAID-1 in case of a 
drive failure wont get you into this situation.

-- 
Jeff O'Brien
Network Technician/ Manufacturing
Net Technologies / Signull Technologies
1-866-NTI-LINUX / 1-888-Signull
jobrien at ntilinux.com