5.5. Restoring ext2, ext3, or ext4 File Systems

Procedure 5.2. Restoring ext2, ext3, or ext4 File Systems

1. If you are restoring an operating system partition, boot your system into Rescue Mode. See the Booting to Rescue Mode section of the System Administrator's Guide.
   This step is not required for ordinary data partitions.
2. Rebuild the partitions you want to restore by using the fdisk or parted utilites.
   If the partitions no longer exist, recreate them. The new partitions must be large enough to contain the restored data. It is important to get the start and end numbers right; these are the starting and ending sector numbers of the partitions obtained from the fdisk utility when backing up.
   For more information on modifying partitions, see Chapter 13, Partitions
3. Use the mkfs utility to format the destination partition:

   # mkfs.ext4 /dev/device

   Important

   Do not format the partition that stores your backup files.
4. If you created new partitions, re-label all the partitions so they match their entries in the /etc/fstab file:

   # e2label /dev/device label

5. Create temporary mount points and mount the partitions on them:

   # mkdir /mnt/device
   # mount -t ext4 /dev/device /mnt/device

6. Restore the data from backup on the mounted partition:

   # cd /mnt/device
   # restore -rf device-backup-file

   If you want to restore on a remote machine or restore from a backup file that is stored on a remote host, you can use the ssh utility. For more information on ssh, see the Using the ssh Utility section of the System Administrator's Guide.
   Note that you need to configure a password-less login for the following commands. For more information on setting up a password-less ssh login, see the Using Key-based Authentication section of the System Administrator's Guide.
   • To restore a partition on a remote machine from a backup file stored on the same machine:

     # ssh remote-address "cd /mnt/device && cat backup-file | /usr/sbin/restore -r -f -"

   • To restore a partition on a remote machine from a backup file stored on a different remote machine:

     # ssh remote-machine-1 "cd /mnt/device && RSH=/usr/bin/ssh /usr/sbin/restore -rf remote-machine-2:backup-file"

7. Reboot:

   # systemctl reboot