backup restore help

[bdominick]

I had posted something on this earlier but asked for it to be removed because my problem solved itself. Now I've got almost exactly the same problem (a MovableType plugin seems to have screwed up the MT cgi admin panel). I am ready to abandon the whole thing, but I can't figure out what caused the problem. So I guess I need to do a restore. Alex had suggested I compare the files in my cgi-bin (where the problem seemed to occur) to my backup files, but the tar.gz file is over 4GB, so I'm not sure that's very efficient.

My last hope is to undo the operation that caused this problem. I ran tar -xpf PromoteThis-1.05.tar on a tarball that was supposed to put the plugin in place. That process may have overwritten something inside my cgi-bin dir that is important, or in a subdirectory. I've deleted my original files from when I migrated the client to my server, so I can't really compare modification dates with anything.

Is there any way to undo a tarball operation in Linux? Short of that, I'm going to have to do a restore, I guess. But I assume the only thing that could have changed is files within the cgi-bin directory. Is there any way to just restore that directory from the backup tar.gz? If not, can I restore FILES ONLY by going to WHM > Backup > Restore Backups and un-checking all of the options? Is the default operation to just restore files in the home/[username] directory?

Thanks in advance for any desperately needed help. Sorry for the exhaustive post and all the questions. I just wanted to get it all out there...

Brian

[Matt]

I am not aware of a way to undo an untarring procress. Running "man top" from the CLI might tell you something though.

Usually we just copy the files from /backup to /home that we need so that the entire site doesn't need restored which avoids using WHM which will reload the entire site.

cd /backup/cpbackup/daily/user/homedir/public_html
cp -af somedir /home/user/public_html/somedirTEST

this adds a temp dir called somedirTEST while leaving the original "somedir" in tact on the live site.

Then check out somedirTEST from the web
(make sure you have the right permissions)

and if it looks good then do like:

cd /home/user/public_html
mv somedir somedirBACKUP
mv somedirTEST somedir

Which basically moves the broken "somedir" to "somedirBACKUP" for later in case you need ssomething from the corrupt dir, then loads the backup in its place.

[bdominick]

I am not aware of a way to undo an untarring procress. Running "man top" from the CLI might tell you something though.

I couldn't find anything when I checked...

Usually we just copy the files from /backup to /home that we need so that the entire site doesn't need restored which avoids using WHM which will reload the entire site.

cd /backup/cpbackup/daily/user/homedir/public_html
cp -af somedir /home/user/public_html/somedirTEST

this adds a temp dir called somedirTEST while leaving the original "somedir" in tact on the live site.

Oh, man. I didn't realize the -a argument was to look inside an archive. Not sure what I thought it was for. The Linux command docs are kind of weak on explanations. This is a great solution that will no doubt come in handy. I really had no idea you could extract just part of an archive at the CLI. Makes sense.