Restore from Dump on tape

[Duane Attaway]

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Brad Crotchett wrote:

> What about open files?  Can I just overwrite everything, reboot and the
> server should be restored?

Interesting things may happen in the /var and /tmp directories.  Such as
lock files being clobbered and losing permissions to open new xterms,
etc...  I doubt you would clobber anything interesting in the workhorse
/bin, /sbin, /usr, or the popular /home directories.  If you have a full
server running, new processes might in a rare case find very old
configuration files interesting.

I don't know the "correct" way, but I would switch to runlevel 1 (init 1)  
to close all open files. Make sure the system log daemon is not running to
update files.  Just a shell.  If you were to put the drive in sleep mode,
you may find there will be no writes to wake it back up in this state.  
That is good.  As long as no new processes are launched, no old files will
be opened again.  When you are done, run the sync command before
restarting the system.

Another way might be to boot off a boot floppy, such as slack, or even a
bootable ISO, and do it all from there.

There are even sneaky ways you can even wipe over the drive while the
system is running.  Safe ways of doing this would require more time than 
might be worth it, but you can make a RAM disk of a small system and 
chroot into there, remount the drive as read-only, and go to town.