* Brian Victor <bhv1@psu.edu> [20030317 07:52 PST]: > I backed up my debian installation with the following: > > tar --preserve -cv / | ssh 192.168.2.10 'cat > linuxbackup.tar.bz2' That .bz2 extension on that file is misleading. The usual extension for uncompressed tar archives (which is what this line creates) is .tar . > And attempted to restore it with the following: > > ssh 192.168.2.10 'cat linuxbackup.tar.bz2' | tar -jxv Oh, I see. You probably just left out the 'j' above in the email, but not in the actual command that you ran. (Otherwise this extraction line would have failed miserably.) > Both commands were run as root. However, I now have a *lot* of broken > symlinks, which show up like this: > ---------- 1 root root 0 Mar 17 13:19 xdvi.bin > ---------- 1 root root 0 Mar 17 13:19 xmlproc_parse > ---------- 1 root root 0 Mar 17 13:19 xmlproc_val > ---------- 1 root root 0 Mar 17 13:19 yacc Very strange. What type of filesystem are you running on? Any peculiar mount options? Can you tell if the tarball actually has the symlinks in it but the restore messed up, or if the files are stored incorrectly and restored correctly? > > Fixing the rc*/* symlinks allowed me to boot, but the system is still > practically unusable. Is there something I can do or should have done > to preserve the symlinks? And failing that, how do I get the system > back into a usable state? It seems that /var/cache still contains all > the debs I've ever downloaded, and network access is working. > > Thanks in advance to anyone who helps make my machine usable again. Start with finding all such files: # find / -uid 0 -size 0b Then, in order to preserve them, you'll probably need another debian installation to figure out what they're supposed to be. Another thing you could try is to reinstall all of your packages. I would guess that this would take care of most of them. good times, Vineet -- http://www.doorstop.net/ -- "If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all." --Noam Chomsky
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