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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Well I've joined the "accidentally trashing your system with rm -rf" club! Luckily I didn't delete my home directory with all the things I care about, but I did delete /boot and /usr, and maybe /var (long story, boils down to me trying to delete non-system directories named those but reflexively adding the slash in front when I should not have). I have backups of those as well, so what are my prospects of recovering from this by just copying them back in using a live USB? Only issue is they're stored in my server as belonging to the server user (I assume everything in those directories should belong to root and I can just use chown?) But I also don't know if they retain the same permissions when backed up.

Has anyone had any luck recovering a system in this way? I'm hoping not to have to reinstall everything because I had gotten pretty cozy with the current installation.

UPDATE: I finally had the time to sit down and try it, and, I was at least hoping to document some glitchy or unstable behaviour but it just didn't work at all. No matter what I tried I couldn't even get the UEFI to recognize the old system as bootable, so I cut my losses and just reinstalled. Gonna make sure I have btrfs snapshotting enabled this time, which I'm realizing I probably should have done in the first place.

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[-] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

No way, reinstall.

If even file owner is not preserved (it is not always root, espetially in /var), you likely lost files' extanded attributes an, maybe, also permissions. Without them your system won't work normally.

Then, contents of these directories must be consistent with other ones. E. g. /var contains a package manager data about packages you installed. If you installed/removed anything after creating a backup, information about this will be lost.

If you created the backup while system was working, some files (espetially under /var, again) could be changed during that process, and this also makes such backup unusable. Every sysadmin knows that to create a database backup by copying files, dbms must be stopped.

In future, think about restoration before planning a backup and test if this possible immediately after it is done.

this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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