Restoring Backup Archives With Restore

Restoring Backup Archives With Restore

The Restore command is a shell script that uses bru to extract files from a backup (see "bru"). You can also use Restore to read tapes made using the graphical System Manager (see the Personal System Administration Guide).

Restoring a Filesystem With Restore

You can recover multivolume backups with Restore. Enter:

Restore

and you are prompted to insert the tape into the drive.

To extract a single file, use this command:

Restore file1

With the -h option, you can specify the tape drive on a different host workstation:

Restore -h guest@alice.cbs.tv.com file1

You must have login privileges for the given account in order to extract data from a remote drive.

Files are restored into the current directory if the backup was made with relative pathnames. Relative pathnames are those that do not begin with a slash (/) character. Pathnames that begin with a slash are known as absolute pathnames. For example, /usr/bin/vi is an absolute pathname. The leading slash indicates that the pathname begins at the root directory of the system. In contrast, work/special.project/chapter1 is a relative pathname since the lack of a leading slash indicates that the path begins with a directory name in the current directory.

Existing files of the same pathname on the disk are overwritten during a restore operation even if they are more recent than the files on tape. You must be especially careful, then, if you are restoring files with absolute pathnames, because regardless of your current working directory, the file is restored where the pathname indicates.

For example, if the file you are restoring was backed up as /etc/passwd and you are in the directory /tmp, the file you restore overwrites the /etc/passwd file. If the file you are restoring was backed-up as passwd, then restore the passwd file into /tmp.