Speed up your restores

[scsctech]

Here is a quick tip for speeding up restores on mac os.

 

My old method:

Connect the client machine to be restored as a target disk on another client.

Select the source to be restored and the destination as the hard disk mounted on the second client.

Restore full disk.

Performance 75mb/m

 

New method:

Mount the client to be restored as a target disk on the engine server itself.

Select the source from your backup and destination as the hard disk mounted on the server.

Restore full disk.

Performance 310mb/m

 

.....just FYI

[rhwalker]

Your new method will not preserve ownership, ACLs, etc.

 

If all you care about is the data and not the metadata, then you might be OK. However, a mounted volume will not have access to the same set of files that Retrospect client sees because Retrospect client runs setuid root. That's the whole point of the client.

 

Russ

[scsctech]

Good point. Thanks for adding the clarification.

[CallMeDave]

Your new method will not preserve ownership, ACLs, etc

 

I think you're wrong here, Russ, leading the original poster to pass confusion on to others.

 

A restore done to a _locally attached_ volume will certainly maintain all attributes.

 

There's no file sharing involved in the steps provided, so it's all done with whatever unix or custom tools Retrospect uses to write data locally. I can't think of any reason why those tools would fail to write all the file information.

 

Or am I the one missing something... ?

[rhwalker]

Yes,you are, I believe, especially if the two machines aren't OD / LDAP. The notion of UID / GID can be different on the two machines.

 

Also, the view given to ACLs on the eventual target machine may be different from the ACL view present during the restore.

 

If, when mounted on the target machine, the UID and GID structure is the same on both machines and the ACL view is the same, then you are right except for special directories like /dev , which is not the same as /Volumes/foo/dev

 

Russ

[scsctech]

Interesting...

after skipping through the new manual, it states this as the first and preferred method for doing a restore.

 

This feature allows you to turn a Mac (in this case, the Mac to which you wish to restore data) into an external hard disk drive that can be connected via FireWire to another Mac (ideally, the Retrospect server, because you will get the fastest restores over FireWire, rather than over the network).

[rhwalker]

Well, looks like I've got extensive testing to do.

 

I'm waiting for the massive bugfix release (real soon, now) before investing more time. Never could get anything to work before.

 

Russ