Re: Restoring everything with dar_manager

On Fri, Jun 16 2023, Denis Corbin wrote:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> On 16/06/2023 21:13, John Goerzen wrote:
>> Hi,
>> In looking through things a bit, I see that dar_manager does nothing if
>> no files are passed to -r.  I tried both / and . as possibilities, and
>> neither did anything.  I want to restore an entire archive using
>> dar_manager; is there a way to do that that I'm missing?  (Similar to
>> just dar -x without any filters.)
>
> first, its much more efficient to restore with dar directly when it comes to
> restore an entire archive. If this just a full backup, just one line or command
> is needed. If full and differential and/or incremental, simply run dar with in
> turn the full and diff(s) and incremental(s) in the order the have been created
> (eventually adding -w option not to be annoyed when restoring a modified file,
> else dar would ask for confirmation for each file).

Hi Denis,

So here are the scenarios I had in mind, but from an efficiency and an
ease of use perspective.

Let's say you had these backups:

#1 - full
#2 - incremental based on #1
#3 - incremental based on #2

Now say that in #2, you deleted 50GB of data that was in #1.  If you
just play back the whole thing, that's 50GB of unnecessary restores (10
DVD+R slices if you wrote it to DVD+R).  I believe dar_manager can
optimize this.

Secondly, what if your backup scheme is more complicated?  Say you also
have:

#4 - differential based on #1

Further let's imagine that before running backup #3, you created 10GB of
data, which was deleted before running backup #4.  Backup #4 isn't going
to record that deletion, since that data wasn't present in #1.  What
will the result be?  Probably more data than really was on the system at
#4.  I can imagine other scenarios like this as well.

dar_manager would presumably know there's no need to even touch #2 or #3
to get you to the place of #4.

Thanks,

John