Bare-metal restore from full-file backup (Linux)

Restore
1

I’m interested in if anyone successfully integrated a UrBackup Linux full-file backup with a bare-metal disaster recovery solution. I’ve created a Relax and Recover USB that successfully recreates and mounts even complex partition setups such as LVM LUKS, but now need a way to restore the ‘/’ dir I’ve snapshotted with UrBackup on top. Consistency of the root filesystem is handled by configuring UrBackup to use dattobd when making the snapshot.

Rather than include urbackupclientctl in the ReaR live environment, I considered mounting only the latest UrBackup ‘/’ snapshot from a local client backup. The problem is how to deal with hardlinks, symlinks, and permissions when restoring from it. Do UrBackup full file-backups even retain the original permissions? Would this work:

rsync -aAXLv /source /dest

That seems to deal with ACLs, xattrs, and any symlinks UrBackup has utilised, but I assume adding ‘H’ for hardlinks would break things? Do I need to manually deal with any hardlinks in my root?

I’d consider restoring from ZFS or BTRFS to solve these problems, but the typical client I restore to is ext4.

2

You mean copy the files directly from backup storage on the server to the client you want to restore via rsync?

3

Yes just that.

4

File metadata is in the .hashes folder, so that won’t work. The files are all owned by urbackup for example.

5

OK. So if I can get a copy of urbackupclient onto the restore live environment, will the files be restored with correct attributes? I’ve not needed to do a restore yet.