Hello,
Through a bizarre coincidence of three different mistakes/failures in my backup
systems at once, I lost access to my backup pool, and my attempt to restore
from an old mirrored drive (a ZFS volume) also failed to import.
After a couple weeks of trying to get the ZFS pool to import, I gave up and
bought a data recovery tool for ZFS that was able to restore all of my files
from the ZFS volume easily.
However, the restored version only contains the single files without hardlinks.
The vendor who created the software has told me that they can't restore
hardlinks. I'm using Backuppc version 3.3.1.
A few questions related to this:
(1) I first noticed the problem when looking at the web-based Backuppc
interface, which fails to see any backups. Is this simply because the backups
are no longer populated (even though the individual client directories are
still there, with log files and some metadata about the backups)? Or is this a
symptom of something else wrong when each client displays a message saying
"This PC has never been backed up!!"?
(2) Is there any way to reconnect or somehow reassociate the individual backup
files with their backups? Any way to restore the hardlinks (or even some of
them) with any of the Backuppc files that still exist? Or am I basically out
of luck here with a bunch of unindexed files distributed seemingly randomly in
the cpool directory?
(3) If the answer to #2 is "no" -- even if there is no automatic method or tool
I could use to restore hardlinks, is there any way even to associate single
files with backups or filesystem structures on clients anymore? If there is a
way to even look up things by one file at a time, I might consider keeping the
old data around. If not, I'll probably just purge everything and start anew.
(There shouldn't be any critical data lost in these backups, but there's a
sense of security in having old ones around in case there's something I just
forgot to copy out of an old client that's no longer in existence.)
(4) I've read some information on version 4 of Backuppc, which apparently no
longer uses hardlinks. Assuming I can't really reassociate any of the backup
data now -- if I use version 4 going forward, will that prevent the possibility
of this sort of catastrophic loss of all backup associations in the future?
(That's assuming I can do as I have done here, i.e., restore all the content of
the basic filesystem.)
Thanks for any help, suggestions, or other thoughts on this.
-John McKay
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