# Reliability of a "dump", dumpfile



## jaymax (Sep 8, 2009)

How can one determine that a dumpfile produced as a backup is good or reliable?


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## graudeejs (Sep 8, 2009)

you can make sha1 and/or md5 checksum, and later check it, before restoring.

Or you can sign backups with gpg, and then check signature


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## jaymax (Sep 8, 2009)

A clever approach that I'll implement, but this assumes that the initial dump is good. I have a strange situation I am trying to resolve for several weeks now.

I created a dump of my / partition prior to an upgrade, and have to do a restore. The restored partition has a huge discrepancy between the dk and du outputs. Partition is 512 MB, du ~ 80 MB, dk > 512 Mb producing "filesystem full" condition. Was able to reduce this to 87% full capacity by selective file removal. No open file handles could be found. Several reboots, fscks etc. but the status quo is maintained.

Decided to make another dump and restore, but decide to do a file listing of the new dump, when I discovered several if not all of the /usr files included, of course this causes the 100% cap. of / to be exceeded. I don't know if there was a bug in the O/S 6 dump? My tmp, usr are on separate slices var is soft linked to /usr/var so this is rather bizarre. Is there a work around for this, e.g to remove all these files from the dumpfile, if it is possible, or do I have to install v. 7.4 and rebuild everything from scratch (hate to think of this)


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## graudeejs (Sep 8, 2009)

I have never had problem like that.
I have done many dump/restores in past, and no problem at all.
perhaps read my HowTo:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=185

By O/S 6 you mean FreeBSD 6.x right?

Btw if you upgrade to 7.X you don't need to rebuild everything from scratch (most thing, if not all, will just work)

Also it is possible to extract selected file/files from archive, read restore man page about interactive restore


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## jaymax (Sep 11, 2009)

The problem was due to a copy of the /usr directory hiding behind the /usr mount point.

I was of he impression that I had to go through the 6.0 > 6.4 > 7.0 > 7.4 upgrade steps to avoid problems. My attempt again to do a 6.0 > 6.4 upgrade had to be aborted twice again because of an I/O error of the /tmp and /var files, probably tha's where my problem occurred earlier, anyway this time I was able to back out gracefully. 

Can I safely do a 6.0 > 7.2 traverse? Using sysinstall do I invoke a Standard Installation or just an Upgrade? How do I maintain the integrity of the current setting. Apart from the system filed that would probably have to be merged, there are qmail and others that I would like to maintain.

Thanks


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## graudeejs (Sep 11, 2009)

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading.html


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