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Novice Help with restore from local USB

Offline abarron

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Novice Help with restore from local USB
« on: May 04, 2015, 06:19:38 AM »
Hi

I was recently having issues with backup to workstation over a LAN:   http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,51664.0.html  I am running SME server 8.1.

In the previous post it was suggested by Janet that I should copy everything to a locally mounted USB drive which I have now done (it took nearly three days but that is another issue).

I wish to restore that data and having followed the relevant instructions in http://wiki.contribs.org/USBDisks  and  http://wiki.contribs.org/AddExtraHardDisk#Partitioning_the_disk  I now have a 3TB hard drive which is mountable to my server and I can see all the .dar backup files correctly.

I noted that at the bottom of the USB Disks 'How To'  there was the statement:-

Note: When configuring a USB drive to be used by the built in Workstation Backup To USB you must ensure that the drive is not mounted automatically. When configuring the Workstation Backup, it will look for unmounted removable drives and allow you to select what you want. If the drive is already mounted when you configure it then you will get an error saying "No Removable disk available".

I therefore carefully unmounted the drive before attempting to configure the backup/restore from 'Local Removable Disc' as set up in the workstation backup options (same parameters as the original backup apart from destination).

I have labelled the drive 'usbBackup' but the option to choose the backup share says 'nolabel' and I am unable to persuade it otherwise.

Whether it is relevant I don't know but I have not edited fstab because of the note about not mounting the device automatically.

Here are the first few lines from issuing  dumpe2fs which I believe confirm the label on the disk:-

[root@server /]# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1
dumpe2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem volume name:   usbBackup
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          49e2ac7d-8120-4934-b95d-5acf6b3bf63f
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53


Obviously I have missed something or made an error but I am unable to work out what, if anyone would be kind enough to help I will be most grateful.  Thank you.


« Last Edit: May 04, 2015, 06:23:10 AM by abarron »

Offline abarron

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Re: Novice Help with restore from local USB
« Reply #1 on: May 06, 2015, 11:32:37 AM »
OK so I have it working.

The only way I could find to make the DAR backup / restore from workstation recognise my locally connected USB drive was to upgrade to SME v9 plus all the upgrades (there's a relevant bug fix) which probably means this post is now in the wrong place.  That is not to say it doesn't work with v8.1 I just couldn't make it do so.

Gotchas for a Noob:

1. Making sure the drive really wasn't mounted before starting the restore.

2. Specifying the folder structure correctly on the USB disc. This is obvious now I have realised but wasn't obvious to me to start with despite being told about it by Janet.  The problem:  source of backup copied to USB had the path   share\server.domain\set2  (it was on windows)   I copied the whole path onto the usb drive i.e. the files resided in share/server.domain/set2.

This is wrong because share becomes the usb disk label so it should have been   usbBackup/server.domain/set2  where usbBackup is the name of the disk so server.domain/set2 was in the root of the disk.

As I say obvious now but it wasn't to a novice to start with.

If that helps anyone else then great.

Thank you to everyone for the help in the other thread.