[ale] Restore DVD

[Christopher Fowler]

I'm creating a restore DVD and it is taking a very long time to restore
the data.  It takes longer to restore than it did to install the system.

I'm using dump/restore to do the archival and restoration.  When I do
create the backup I am creating it with the option '-j9'.  This adds the
highest level ob bzip2 compression.  I am not concerned with the
resources that takes since the system is a 3.0P4 with 1mb cache.  It has
plenty of horsepower to do the restoration.

What  I can not figure out is why it is taking so long.

Here is the data:

#1 Restore DVD

12x CD-RW used for testing and not wasting blank CD-Rs


#2 disk usage and size after restore

Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root.old           891.0k    387.0k    504.0k  43% /initrd
/dev/hdc                651.2M    651.2M         0 100% /initrd/cd
/dev/loop0               89.7M     89.7M         0 100% /
none                    501.5M      3.3M    498.2M   1% /mnt/rw
/dev/md0                180.0G      1.6G    169.1G   1% /mnt/rw/tmp/md0

I'm only restoring 1.6G of stuff


#3 Time it took to do resotre:

*************************************************
* Restoration Complete!                         *
*************************************************
Restoration took 15903 seconds

That is a very long time

#4 Script used
#!/bin/sh

echo "*************************************************"
echo "* Restore System to Factory Defaults            *"
echo "*************************************************"
echo -n "Are you sure (y/n): "
read ans
if [ $ans != 'y' ]
then
        exit 0
fi

START=`date +%s`

raidstop --configfile /data/raidtab /dev/md0 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
echo "Blanking /dev/hda"
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=1024k count=100
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda2 bs=1024k count=100
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024k count=5
echo "Blanking /dev/hdb"
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1024k count=100
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb2 bs=1024k count=100
echo "Creating partitions on /dev/hda"
sfdisk /dev/hda < /data/hda.out || exit 1
echo "Creating partitions on /dev/hdb"
sfdisk /dev/hdb < /data/hdb.out || exit 2
echo "Creating swap on /dev/hda2"
mkswap -v1 /dev/hda2 || exit 2
echo "Creating swap on /dev/hdb2"
mkswap -v1 /dev/hda2 || exit 2
echo "Turning RAID1 on /dev/md0"
mkraid --configfile /data/raidtab --really-force /dev/md0 || exit 3
echo "Creating FS"
mke2fs -j -i 4096 /dev/md0 || exit 4
echo "Mounting FS"
mkdir /tmp/md0 || exit 5
mount -t ext3 /dev/md0 /tmp/md0 || exit 6
echo "Restoring files (this may take a while)...."
cd /tmp/md0
restore -rvf /data/dump.out
mkdir proc
mkdir sys
cd /
echo "Restoring GRUB."      
grub --batch < /data/grub.conf
STOP=`date +%s`
TTIME=`expr $STOP - $START`
echo ""
echo "*************************************************"
echo "* Restoration Complete!                         *"
echo "*************************************************"
echo "Restoration took $TTIME seconds"


Should I skip restore and use tar?