Topic: Not able to restore.

[Drifting]

SME 8.2 server of a friend who lives miles away. Finally go him to send the server to me to upgrade it! Since arriving things have gone down hill steadily

Followed instructions to back to USB and do a restore to 9.2, all seemed to go well and was happy that it reached 100% and completed. It was then that I noticed that one of the disk in the mirror set had died.

Replaced both disks with new, and installed a clean 9.2, did a restore from USB, of which that seemed to complete happily. However I find now that I have lost the users, and the configuration! Data seems to have restored, so have the user directories and email.

Had to set the server name and password, as well as the two network cards, then went into the console and tried and restore from there, same end result. I am now at a total loss as to what to do. Annoyingly I do not have any of the configuration details at all.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Paul.

[ReetP]

FWIW if you got a good restore first time out then keep the good disk just in case.

I presume the machine is still not fully net connected so it doesn't try to receive/lose mail?

Have you checked your logs for errors?

[Drifting]

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I have no idea if it is a good restore, I would assume it was as it completed. But for the life of my I do not understand why it has not restored the config or the users!

Suppose I could try and see what is inside the single compressed file? But not sure what I would need to restore to put the users back. Did read about a manual restore via ssh, so may copy the backup to the drive and see if I can uncompress and restore.
And no internet, as I have lost the config! I can however change it to match my local network, but not sure how that would benefit me?

Paul.

[ReetP]

OK,

Ah just realised you said the *backup* completed before the drive died, not a *restore*. My bad. Do you have the original GOOD disk??? That may be a life saver......

Next, you haven't told me if you found anything in your logs on the restored machine. Remember I'm not sat in front of you server. Go through and check for any errors - particularly /var/log/messages

I can't remember if there is a restore log anywhere - check in /root and /var/log

Copy the compressed file to another machine - that way you hopefully get a decent copy as a backup for starters in case your USB drive goes West. You can then open/extract it to check what was backed up, and if there are any errors - it'll be way faster when it is on a desktop.

It may be OK... but there is always a possibility that the backup never fully completed and data was either missed or corrupted.

If you still have the original good drive you may have an escape hatch in case the backup is faulty.

[Drifting]

Sadly no. Was way too trusting of the sme backup. Managed to get the bulk of it back with the tgz repair tool I found,

Thanks for the help.

Paul

[ReetP]

Sadly no. Was way too trusting of the sme backup.

It was the drive that let you down, not really SME, though I am not sure why the backup didn't terminate correctly. I presume you did get a notice saying backup complete?

Personally I don't trust USB so I have a variety of backup methods all running as well - affa, direct copy, mysqlbackup etc etc. Before an upgrade I make sure I have a good few copies of all the important bits first.

I'm not sure what happened to the original drive - you said one died, but then you should have had a spare, and that would most likely have been recoverable?

Managed to get the bulk of it back with the tgz repair tool I found,

Thanks heavens for small mercies then.

Thanks for the help.

NP - shame we couldn't do more

[Drifting]

Hey its fine, wrongly accusing SME backup! It was my fault, should have really trusted my gut that said take another copy, but I thought, nope should all be well. Typical....

Thanks for all of you for taking the time to help, really appreciated this end.

Best wishes
Paul.

[ReetP]

LOL.... know that feeling.

Act in haste, repent horribly for a very long time

Normally the backup process is pretty resilient so it does make me wonder what happened, but that boat has sailed.

Onwards & upwards