How to recover using a full backup?

[Volker Wysk]

Hi

Am Montag, 3. September 2018, 10:33:20 CEST schrieb Colin Watson:
> One caution: for full-system backups, you need to make sure that your
> handling of various bits of file metadata is exactly faithful, and there
> are some gotchas there.  You should check these things, both that the
> backup preserves them, *and* that your restore strategy preserves them:
> 
>  * symlinks are preserved as symlinks rather than copying the contents
>  * hardlinks are preserved (i.e. if two files share the same inode, then
>    this is true in the backup as well)
>  * extended attributes are preserved
>  * modification times are preserved
>  * numeric user and group IDs are used throughout, rather than assuming
>    that user and group names can be looked up in matching passwd and
>    group databases which probably won't be available when you're doing a
>    full-system restore (I got this wrong once and it was a right pain to
>    fix everything up manually)
>  * sparse files are handled efficiently (this isn't vital, but if you
>    have any sparse files on your system then you can end up with the
>    restored system taking up a lot more disk space than it used to
>    otherwise)

Note:  Dar meets all of these requirements. See https://sourceforge.net/p/dar/mailman/message/36407058/ for details.

Volker