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System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration

Troubleshooting Backup Problems

This section describes some basic troubleshooting techniques to use when backing up and restoring data.

The root (/) File System Fills Up After You Back Up a File System

You back up a file system, and the root (/) file system fills up. Nothing is written to the media, and the ufsdump command prompts you to insert the second volume of media.

Reason Error Occurred 

How to Fix the Problem 

If you used an invalid destination device name with the -f option, the ufsdump command wrote to a file in the /dev directory of the root (/) file system, filling it up. For example, if you typed /dev/rmt/st0 instead of /dev/rmt/0, the backup file /dev/rmt/st0 was created on the disk rather than being sent to the tape drive.

Use the ls -tl command in the /dev directory to identify which file is newly created and abnormally large, and remove it.

Make Sure the Backup and Restore Commands Match

You can only use the ufsrestore command to restore files backed up with the ufsdump command. If you back up with the tar command, restore with the tar command. If you use the ufsrestore command to restore a tape that was written with another command, an error message tells you that the tape is not in ufsdump format.

Check to Make Sure You Have the Right Current Directory

It is easy to restore files to the wrong location. Because the ufsdump command always copies files with full path names relative to the root of the file system, you should usually change to the root directory of the file system before running the ufsrestore command. If you change to a lower-level directory, after you restore the files you will see a complete file tree created under that directory.

Interactive Commands

When you use the interactive command, a ufsrestore> prompt is displayed, as shown in this example:


# ufsrestore ivf /dev/rmt/0
Verify volume and initialize maps
Media block size is 126
Dump   date: Fri Jan 30 10:13:46 2004
Dumped from: the epoch
Level 0 dump of /export/home on starbug:/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7
Label: none
Extract directories from tape
Initialize symbol table.
ufsrestore >

At the ufsrestore> prompt, you can use the commands listed on Chapter 28, UFS Backup and Restore Commands (Reference), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems to find files, create a list of files to be restored, and restore them.