[OpenAFS] data recovery from afs cache

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Thursday, June 08, 2006 03:34:24 AM +0200 Rafael Marco de Lucas 
<rmarco@ifca.unican.es> wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> i would like to rescue some data contained in an AFS client cache,
> i could locate some files by hand doing some "grep -r" in the cache
> directory but it is quite complex and this way i can not recover
> the filename,
>  is it possible somehow to access as an offline filesystem ?
> and in example recover all the files in a tarball keeping all filenames
> and all the directory structure ?
>  i would thank a lot any help,

Not trivially, no.  The cache stores chunks of the contents of files and 
directories.  These are identified by each file's cell, volume, vnode 
number, and uniqifier, which are collectively known as a File IDentifier or 
FID.  Cache chunks are not identified by filenames because, besides being 
expensive to compute and process, filenames make extremely poor identifiers 
(they are unstable, are not unique, and do not identify a unique object, 
particularly when time is taken into account).

Reconstructing filenames might be possible in some cases, given the 
CacheItems file and the complete contents of the cache.  If you are looking 
for a specific file or set of files, you are more likely to have success by 
identifying the FID's of the files and directories you are interested in, 
and then looking for cache chunks which correspond to those files.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA