Command Syntax: arcvrestoregui

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 arcvrestoregui.py program.

Purpose

The arcvrestoregui.py program is a file restoration utility with a graphical user interface. You can use this to restore the contents of a particular file or directory tree. You can choose to restore the last version of a file that was backed up, or some particular version by selecting a backup event ID.

Directories can be restored to the last version, or to their state up to and including some particular backup event, or you can choose to restore only the files in them that were backed up during a single backup event.

The program can also be used to verify the integrity of the backups for a particular directory tree.

This program requires that wxPython is installed, see the installation section on the ArcvBack main page.

An alternative to this is the arcvrestore.py command that uses a command line interface.

Syntax

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

The full command syntax is:

arcvrestoregui [-h] [-a archivepath] [-ini config.ini]

where items in the square brackets are optional.

Options

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

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.


Usage

Typically you will just issue the command (you might want to put this in a batch file and make a short cut to it):

arcvrestoregui.py

and in a few seconds a small window will open that will look something like this:

Initial Window

These are the three machines I am currently backing up.  You can expand nodes on this tree to see sub-directories and files:

Expanded directory view

To restore an individual file or version of that file you expand its node to show the individual versions as I have done in the following image:

Versions of the config.ini file

here you can see that there are three different versions of config.ini backed up. To restore one of these you right click on it and select the "Restore this version" item from the popup menu. If you just want to restore the latest version of a file you can right click on the file name and select the "Restore latest version" popup menu item. After selecting one of these menu items the the following directory selection dialogue will appear:

Select location to restore file to

use this to select the directory where you wish to restore the file to and then click on "OK". You can also use this to make a new empty folder to restore the files into, just make sure to click on the name of the folder so it is highlighted before clicking on the OK.

To restore a directory you follow pretty much the same steps, just right click on the directory name and then select "Restore" from the pop-up menu. As of version 4.0 you can also specify a particular backup event ID when restoring a directory tree. You can choose to restore up to and including the specified event ID (in which case you get a restored directory that contains the latest version of all the files up to that event, which is probably what you want) or you can choose to restore only the files that were recorded as part of a single particular event (which you might want to do if you are only trying to figure out what changed between two points in time).

The "List media" menu item will scan the directory to determine what additional package files (i.e. media) are needed (use the -a archivepath command line parameter to supply these) before the restore can be done.

The three "Verify" menu items can be used to verify the integrity of the backups for a particular directory tree. These work the same way as the "Backup" menu items, but do not actually write any files to disk. If they encounter any problems they will display warning dialogues and will provide a summary of the package files that had trouble at the end.




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