[OpenAFS] files missing from incremental vos restore

[Christoph Scheurer]

Hello,

at our site we are using OpenAFS to serve home-directories for about 60
users. On Oct 27. we had a hardware failure on an AFS fileserver partition and
had to restore volume dumps from our backup. The restore procedure finished
succesfully but when we checked the restored volumes we had to realize that
some files were missing. Closer inspection showed that these files were
restored from the most recent full dumps but then removed by restoring the
subsequent incremental dumps, even that the respective files had not been
removed between dumps from the original volumes. Has anyone else
encountered/solved this problem before?

We are running OpenAFS 1.2.13 on the fileserver and the dump/restore is also
performed on that server locally. Our backup strategy is the following:

 * every night at 0:10 (local time) perform a 'vos backupsys user'
 * afterwards perform full 'vos dump' for each volume user.*.backup on the 1st
   of every month
 * every other day MM/DD/YYYY perform an incremental dump with -time option
   MM/(DD-1)/YYYY for each volume user.*.backup

Is there a problem with synchronization/serialiation when using 'vos backupsys',
i.e. should we explicitly 'vos backup' each individual volume before dumping
it? Or is it better to directly dump the RW volume instead of the RO backup
copy?

Kind regards,

Ch. Scheurer

-- 
Christoph Scheurer                                  GnuPG key Id: 0x6128C6B6

contact:   http://www.theo.chemie.tu-muenchen.de/homepages/scheurer/