Restore

Eventually all systems breakdown due to hardware failures, software bugs, or human error. This guide shows you how to restore your local backup to help in recovering your system to its normal operating condition.

To conduct the process you need the eBox installer CD-ROM. This gives access to the Ubuntu operating system on which eBox is built. All the tools you require are provided there.

Restore a Local Backup

Boot your server using the eBox installer CD-ROM and select Rescue a broken system.

Initially, you will see the same screens and questions as those shown when installing a new system. Continue until the rescue mode menu is displayed:

1. Select /dev/sda1 as root file system, this is where /boot is located.
2. Select Execute a shell in the installer environment.
3. An information message is shown.

Rescue mode then offers you a restricted shell to work in:

Create a mount point for the backup and mount it:

% mkdir /mnt/backup
% mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup

Create a mount point for the root partition and mount it. Then delete everything there:

% mkdir /mnt/ebox
% mount -t ext3 /dev/ebox/root /mnt/ebox
% rm -fr /mnt/ebox/*

Do the same with var:

% mkdir /mnt/ebox/var
% mount -t xfs /dev/ebox/var /mnt/ebox/var
% rm -fr /mnt/ebox/var/*

Restore your backup data:

% cd /mnt/backup/ebox-backup
% cp -ra * /mnt/ebox/

Create the directories that you excluded when creating the backup. Then clean up /var/run, /var/lock and rdiff-backup-data:

% mkdir /mnt/ebox/dev
% mkdir /mnt/ebox/sys
% mkdir /mnt/ebox/proc
% rm -fr /mnt/ebox/var/run/*
% rm -fr /mnt/ebox/var/lock/*
% rm -fr /mnt/ebox/rdiff-backup-data

The rescue mode mounted /boot under /target so you must clean this directory and move the restored contents there:

% rm -fr /target/*
% mv /mnt/ebox/boot/* /target/*

Unmount the /var partition. Now you must create var/run and var/lock; without this step Ubuntu will fail to start up correctly. The final steps are to unmount the root partition and exit from the restricted shell.

% umount /mnt/ebox/var
% mkdir /mnt/ebox/var/run 
% mkdir /mnt/ebox/var/lock
% umount /mnt/ebox
% exit

Reboot into the restored system: