Technology for Mortals

So I finally got my FreeBSD machine up & running. I spent all of last night updating all of the installed packages (all to get PHP working right) now that it compiles correctly. And then, I decided to go for broke, and upgrade from FreeBSD 6.3 to FreeBSD 7.0. Immediately before I started, I made backups of everything but I did not test those backups to see if they were good. From the italics, you can see where this story is headed.

Well, the upgrade 7.0 blew up on me. Something went wrong, who knows what. No problems, right? I’ll just boot off of a Live FS CD, run the restore. I’ve done it many times before, even as recently as a few weeks ago. Woops!

For whatever reason, I see to be completely unable to restore from the backups. I don’t know what the problem is, but this time, “restore” is blowing up. So now, I am attempting to rebuild the system from scratch. Luckily, I made a separate backup of the critical data files a few weeks ago, so all is not lost. But needless to say, I have egg all over my face. I know, I seem like the world’s most incompetant sys admin here. Sometimes I am sure I am. But then I think of the mistakes other people make, and I feel a lot better. At least I made the backup in the first place! Ironically, it is the first FreeBSD upgrade that’s ever failed on me, and the first time I ever made a backup before doing an upgrade.

I don’t know what went wrong here; I have never had a problem with the FreeBSD backups in the past. I found the problem; the backup was fine, it was my use of “restore” combined with the Live FS CD that was the problem! But a painfull lesson (yet another) is to be learned here. Before counting on your backups, test them the process from top to bottom!

J.Ja