When a System Dies; Getting back in operation again.

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Monday 04 May 2009 15:59:14 Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 10:31:16AM +0200, Jonathan McKeown wrote:
>
> > If you have kept the right information beforehand, you can actually
> > restore your dumps onto ``bare metal'' without doing a partial install
> > first, and with the same newfs settings for each partition as you
> > originally had. You need to use bsdlabel and dumpfs -m and keep the
> > output for rebuilding. The rest of this message is the details.
>
> If you have a specific reason to want your new filesystems' to have
> identical superblock info, you can use dumpfs -m, but you don't need
> to worry about all that.   Just fdisk, bsdlabel and then let newfs
> take its defaults.

Which of your filesystems currently has softupdates disabled? You may not 
care - but the point is that using dumpfs in the way I described will 
preserve that information (along with all the other tuning options) for 
people who do care.

If you're restoring a complete machine from backup, the less you have to think 
about, the better. Knowing that my filesystems are going to be restored with 
whatever tuning options I was previously running with, without my having to 
try and remember, gives me peace of mind ahead of time.

Jonathan