>The most straightforward method appears to be to reinstall the operating
>system, use native utilities (tar or dump) or install amanda utilities, then
>restore the files.
That's the general theory.
>If I'm running amrecover onto a newly installed operating system, will it
>overwrite existing files? ...
You're asking the wrong question. Amrecover does not write files.
It runs a recover program for you based on what program was used to
create the dump image (tar, dump/restore, etc). You need to look at
the documentation for that program to see what it does about overwriting.
In general, I think most restore programs do overwrite, although I'm
pretty sure I remember someone posting about one of the free Unix ones
not doing so without some extra flag (sigh -- nothing like consistency).
I would not use amrecover (at the moment) to do a full recovery. It is
more oriented toward individual files/directories. Most recover programs
want different parameters to tell them this is a full recovery so they
can do things a bit differently (e.g. remove files that come back in
one image but have been removed in a later one).
I've thought (and have a TODO item) about adding a flag/feature to
amrecover to do this, but haven't had the energy to go around to all
the recover program variations and figuring out what they would want.
>Also, can someone give me an example of using tar or dump to restore a file
>off of a remote machine?
Starting from the client:
client $ rsh -n server mt -f /dev/whatever rewind
client $ rsh -n server mt -f /dev/whatever fsf NN # if desired
client $ rsh -n server /path/to/amrestore -p /dev/whatever client disk | \
/path/to/restore/pgm args ...
Is that close enough or do you want to see a real live example? Oh,
never mind :-). Here's one from one of my Solaris systems ("gandalf"
is the client, "fortress" is the server):
gandalf $ rsh -n fortress mt -f /dev/rmt/12mn rewind
gandalf $ rsh -n fortress mt -f /dev/rmt/12mn fsf 3
gandalf $ rsh -n fortress /opt/amanda/sbin/amrestore \
-p \
/dev/rmt/12mn \
gandalf.cc.purdue.edu \
/work \
| /usr/sbin/ufsrestore xbf 2 - \
/tmp/setiathome-3.03.sparc-sun-solaris2.6/state.sah
amrestore: WARNING: not at start of tape, file numbers will be offset
amrestore: 0: restoring gandalf.cc.purdue.edu._work.20010411.1
set owner/mode for '.'? [yn] n
FYI, I wrote some junk in the restored file and did this a second time,
and ufsrestore *does* overwrite the file if it exists.
>Ivan
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
