Cross-System Restore?

I have an Xserve running Leopard Server (10.5.x) whose internal drive crashed hard this afternoon. I suspect I'm going to have to reformat the drive and restore it (using QRecall, of course) from my backups.

The external backup drive is bootable, but it's running Tiger Server (10.4.x). I have the latest version of QRecall installed on both drives. If I boot from the external drive, running Tiger Server, will there be any problems with using that system to restore Leopard Server onto the internal drive? If necessary, I can boot from the Leopard Server install disc and use it to reformat the internal drive.

-- Bruce

Bruce Giles wrote:If I boot from the external drive, running Tiger Server, will there be any problems with using that system to restore Leopard Server onto the internal drive?

I suspect that this won't work. While the file system differences between Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5) are not at huge as those between Leopard and Snow Leopard (10.6), Leopard introduced access control lists (ACLs) that I believe are critical for a few key OS files. Tiger lacks the APIs for restoring ACLs, so QRecall will ignore ACLs captured by a Leopard system.

My suggestion would be to install a minimal Leopard system—it can be a 10.5 client, it doesn't have to be a server—on an external drive, copy over a copy of QRecall, bo use that to restore the 10.5 server.

If you don't have a spare external drive, install Leopard on the Xserver, install QRecall, perform a "live" restore, and then immediately reboot.

James Bucanek wrote:I suspect that this won't work. While the file system differences between Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5) are not at huge as those between Leopard and Snow Leopard (10.6), Leopard introduced access control lists (ACLs) that I believe are critical for a few key OS files. Tiger lacks the APIs for restoring ACLs, so QRecall will ignore ACLs captured by a Leopard system.

That's what I was afraid of. I guess I should mention that when I booted off the external drive, the internal was still accessible. Since QRecall did its last capture at 2:00 AM today, if I restore from that, everyone loses all the work they did today. So before I left this afternoon, I started a capture of the Groups and Users folders, to a new archive file, hoping that I might be able to capture all the work that was done today. Sounds like I'm going to need to re-do that capture, after I get a bootable Leopard Server system running.

My suggestion would be to install a minimal Leopard system—it can be a 10.5 client, it doesn't have to be a server—on an external drive, copy over a copy of QRecall, bo use that to restore the 10.5 server.

If you don't have a spare external drive, install Leopard on the Xserver, install QRecall, perform a "live" restore, and then immediately reboot.

Hmmm... It hadn't occurred to me to install a non-server version. That would be faster and easier than trying to install Leopard Server, just to get a restore going. I've got several spare drives, so that shouldn't be a problem. I knew I could do a live restore, and if necessary I'll resort to that, but that always makes me nervous. I'd rather restore to a volume that I'm not booted from, if possible.

Thanks!

-- Bruce