On Sat, 17 Jan 1998, VaX#n8 wrote:

* ->I have a drive which started flaking out under high loads only, and an
* ->old backup, and am wondering if anyone else has had this scenario and
* ->written scripts to help out.
* ->
* ->Basically I want to merge changes which occured between the backup and
* ->current date on the flaky drive to the copy on the new drive (restored
* ->from backup).  Essentially, both copies have diverged from a common
* ->ancestor.
* ->
* ->There is also the additional fun that certain inodes on the
* ->flaky drive are corrupted beyond repair (fsck will not fix them).
* ->This leads to very bizzare files in that filesystem, with huge
* ->uids, gids, odd modes, and size and block numbers which don't add up.
* ->
* ->I've written some PERL scripts myself, should anyone want them:
* ->should_copy.pl - verifies that the modes are sane, the file types
* ->                 are not unusual, that the (size, blocks) is possible,
* ->                 that uids and gids have /etc/{passwd,groups} entries,
* ->                 etc.
* ->compare_fs.pl - given a (flaky) filesystem, traverses it, performing
* ->                sanity checks along the way (as above, then some),
* ->                then compares to another live (new) filesystem,
* ->                issuing differences to stderr and stdout.
* ->
* ->There are all kinds of interesting things you could try to fix during
* ->such a comparison.  For example, should one worry about the inode numbers
* ->or change times?  What do you do if a directory has changed?  If the number
* ->of links to a file has changed?  Access times?  What about whiteouts?
* ->
* ->I think I could use an explanation of file flags, and some of the
* ->flags and whiteouts (beyond what is in sys/stat.h).
* ->
* ->Then, there's the data-centric stuff.  What files do you worry about
* ->differences in?  I run diff on some pairs of files.  What about binary
* ->files?  What about mail spools?  What about MH folders?  CVS repositories
* ->and working directories (particularly if the changes to the repository
* ->are lost)?
* ->

I've got an idea on how to spot different files for sure: run COPS on both
systems (or something else that generates MD5 on all files) and compare the
results.  For the files that differ use diff to figure out how.  My 2 cents. 
L8r.


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