xfsrestore seems to hang

xfsrestore seems to hang

[prad]

this seems to be a new development.

in the past, i've xfsdumped my home directory as home.xfs in a separate
partition on the same drive and have extracted a specific file without
any difficulties.

now i'm trying to do the same thing on an external usb drive which has
the xfs filesystem on it.

i can xfsdump to it no problem.

then i try to restore:
1. cd into the directory /media/f6.....
2. mkdir tmp
3. xfsrestore -i -f home.xfs tmp/
4. ls and cd to the right place - all work just fine
5. add the file i want to extract
6. extract

things seem to be working:

 -> ls 
        77766469 kyron/
             131 pradmin/

 -> cd pradmin/Public

 -> ls
      1766125579 ipflush.sh 
      1766125536 iptables.sh 

 -> add ipflush.sh

 -> ls
    * 1766125579 ipflush.sh 
      1766125536 iptables.sh 

 -> extract

 --------------------------------- end dialog ---------------------------------

xfsrestore: restoring non-directory files


but it just hangs on the last line and we wait and wait and wait.

top shows that xfsrestore is using 3% of cpu so something is happening
supposedly, but i don't know what.

inside tmp there are the usual directories:
orphanage and xfsrestorehousekeepingdir
but they don't want to go away (orphanage is empty) because the thing
doesn't finish.

i tried the same thing with a -V5, but the only difference seemed to be
hanging on:
xfsrestore:general: restoring non-directory files

are there error logfiles somewhere?
how can i troubleshoot this problem?

-- 
in friendship,
prad

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Re: xfsrestore seems to hang

[prad]

prad <prad@towardsfreedom.com> writes:

> but it just hangs on the last line and we wait and wait and wait.
>
could it be that we're supposed to?

i just extracted a 21K file from a 3G dump and it took 168s.
the home.xfs file is 129G more than 40times the size of the small one,
so if things are simply proportional we're looking at 

168s x 40 = 112m or well over an hour and a half!

i acknowledge that i stopped the thing after a little more than half an
hour.

so is it possible that the xfsrestore system has to go through the
motion of handling the entire file even when it's just extracting a
small part of it and things will take their time?

-- 
in friendship,
prad

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Re: xfsrestore seems to hang

[Michael Weissenbacher]

Hi Prad!
> 
> so is it possible that the xfsrestore system has to go through the
> motion of handling the entire file even when it's just extracting a
> small part of it and things will take their time?
> 
Yes, that's simply the way it works. It has to go through the whole dump
to restore one file. Same thing as if you used tar. Both were originally
designed to be written to tape. So if you want to restore single files
you should look for another solution. I like to use rsync a lot for that.

cheers,
michael

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Re: xfsrestore seems to hang

[prad]

Michael Weissenbacher <mw@dermichi.com> writes:

> Hi Prad!
>> 
>> so is it possible that the xfsrestore system has to go through the
>> motion of handling the entire file even when it's just extracting a
>> small part of it and things will take their time?
>> 
> Yes, that's simply the way it works. It has to go through the whole dump
> to restore one file. Same thing as if you used tar. Both were originally
> designed to be written to tape. So if you want to restore single files
> you should look for another solution. I like to use rsync a lot for that.
>
ok thx michael!
glad that's all cleared up now.

so the most intelligent thing to might be to have the xfsdump
filesystems available for that big crash possibility and just work on a
day-to-day basis with rsync which doesn't duplicate certain things i've
found, but seems to be fantastic for ordinary data items.

i found this document while looking for backup strategies:
http://menehune.opt.wfu.edu/Kokua/SGI/007-2862-005/sgi_html/pt01.html

there is a substantial section on xfsdump and xfsrestore as well as
several other tools (no rsync though), so i'm sure i'll find some good
ideas from there on developing an optimal bkp mechanism for our needs.

-- 
in friendship,
prad

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