6.5. Restore an ext2/3/4 File System

Procedure 6.2. Restore an ext2/3/4 File System Example

1. If you are restoring an operating system partition, bootup your system into Rescue Mode. This step is not required for ordinary data partitions.
2. Rebuild sda1/sda2/sda3/sda4/sda5 by using the fdisk command.

   Note

   If necessary, create the partitions to contain the restored file systems. 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.
3. Format the destination partitions by using the mkfs command, as shown below.

   Important

   DO NOT format /dev/sda6 in the above example because it saves backup files.

   # mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
   # mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
   # mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda3
   

4. If creating new partitions, re-label all the partitions so they match the fstab file. This step is not required if the partitions are not being recreated.

   # e2label /dev/sda1 /boot1
   # e2label /dev/sda2 /
   # e2label /dev/sda3 /data
   # mkswap -L SWAP-sda5 /dev/sda5
   

5. Prepare the working directories.

   # mkdir /mnt/sda1
   # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
   # mkdir /mnt/sda2
   # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2
   # mkdir /mnt/sda3
   # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3
   # mkdir /backup-files
   # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /backup-files
   

6. Restore the data.

   # cd /mnt/sda1
   # restore -rf /backup-files/sda1.dump
   # cd /mnt/sda2
   # restore -rf /backup-files/sda2.dump
   # cd /mnt/sda3
   # restore -rf /backup-files/sda3.dump
   

   If you want to restore from a remote host or restore from a backup file on a remote host you can use either ssh or rsh. You will need to configure a password-less login for the following examples:
   Login into 10.0.0.87, and restore sda1 from local sda1.dump file:

   # ssh 10.0.0.87 "cd /mnt/sda1 && cat /backup-files/sda1.dump | restore -rf -"
   

   Login into 10.0.0.87, and restore sda1 from a remote 10.66.0.124 sda1.dump file:

   # ssh 10.0.0.87 "cd /mnt/sda1 && RSH=/usr/bin/ssh restore -r -f 10.66.0.124:/tmp/sda1.dump"
   

7. Reboot.