Using tarsnap for disaster recovery

["Hywel Mallett" <hmallett@vstrading.co.uk>]

I've been using tarsnap for a while for backing up a single server
(actually a few, but only one is relevant to this question).
The scenario is that this FreeBSD server backs up /usr/local and a few
bits of /var with each backup. The backup works fine, and a disaster
recovery has been tested onto alternate hardware (install a base FreeBSD
system with tarsnap, install the tarsnap.key and restore from the latest
backup), and it works nicely.
The question is what do I have to consider as far as tarsnap is
concerned? Once we've restored to alternate hardware we'll want to
continue to backup using tarsnap. /usr/local/tarsnap-cache is empty
after the restore (as it's ignored during backup by tarsnap). Will we
need to run tarnap --fsck before re-enabling the backups to rebuild the
cache? Will the fscked data be valid, if data is laid out differently on
disk?
We haven't tested this, as we don't want to risk creating backups from
the test restored system and confusing them with ones from the
production system.
Hywel

-- 
Hywel Mallett
Information Technology/Information Security Manager
Vision Support Trading 




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