Command Syntax: arcvrestore

Copyright 2008 by Stephen Vermeulen
Last updated: 2008 Oct 12


Introduction

This is part of a series of articles on backing up computers. The top page is Design for an Archiving Backup System.

This page describes the command line syntax of the arcvrestore.py program.

Purpose

The arcvrestore.py program is a command line file restoration utility. You can use this to restore the contents of a particular directory or directory tree. You can choose to restore the last version that was backed up, or some particular version by specifying a backup event ID.

An alternative to this is the arcvrestoregui.py command that uses a GUI tree browser to facilitate the navigation and selection process.

Syntax

The arcvrestore.py program gets configuration information from the config.ini file.

The full command syntax is:

arcvrestore [-h] [-r] [-p] [-a archivepath] [-ini config.ini] [-e event] pathbackup destpath

where items in the square brackets are optional.

The first required parameter is the pathbackup which is the full path to the directory you want to restore. The second required parameter is the destpath which is the name of the directory the restored files (and directories if the -r switch is used) will be restored to. The destpath does not need to be in UNC form.

Options

The -h parameter will bring up a short syntax help prompt and then stop.

The -r parameter causes the restore to restore any directory trees and their contents too. You'll probably want to enable this for most restore operations, but since this can greatly increase the number of files that are restored it defaults to off.

The -p parameter is used to place the command into a "list-only" mode, during this it will attempt to find all the necessary package files, and if any are not on line (i.e. not in the backup media cache) it will print their PIDs. You can then locate the missing PID files, place them on line in one or more directories (which you specify with the -a parameter) and run the command again without the -p to actually restore the files.

The -a parameter is used to specify an additional directory the program should search for missing package files. You can include additional directories of package files by including multiple -a parameters.

The -ini parameter is used to tell the command to use a different config.ini file. Typically you will want to do this when you are restoring files from packages that are not part of the current backup version database - which might be the case if you used the arcvdbrebuild.py command to build a new database from old package files.

The -e parameter is used to specify that the version of the files from a particular backup event (rather than the most recent) is to be restored.




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