Restoring changed files?

I was moving our old server (Mac OS X Server 10.4.11) to a different place on our network, and as part of that, I ran the "changeip" command. Something went horribly wrong, and changeip crashed about halfway through the process, leaving our server settings a mess. Some things got changed, and others didn't and I wasn't exactly sure which was which.

I knew I had a good QRecall backup from 2:00 this morning, and there had been no significant changes since then (except for what I did with changeip). The problem was that I didn't know exactly which files changeip had changed, so I didn't know which ones to restore.

What I ended up doing was a complete volume restore, which worked perfectly. (I did boot from the bootable backup volume first, although I understand from the help files that QRecall could have done a live restore. I just figured it might be safer not to be running on the disk being restored.)

So the full volume restore worked, but it seemed a little like swatting flies with an atom bomb. Was there a better way to do this and just restore whatever files had been changed since the last capture? Or is that actually what the full volume restore did?

-- Bruce

Bruce Giles wrote:So the full volume restore worked, but it seemed a little like swatting flies with an atom bomb. Was there a better way to do this and just restore whatever files had been changed since the last capture? Or is that actually what the full volume restore did?

Restore is a "smart" atom bomb.

A Restore only recalls/replaces files that are different than the captured version in the archive.

QRecall compares the file information (size, attributes, modification dates, etc.) against the same item in the archive. If they are identical, QRecall assumes the file hasn't changed and doesn't need to be recalled. This is the same test used to determine if the file has changed during a capture.