Provided by: dar_2.7.3-1_amd64 
NAME
dar_manager - compiles several archives contents in a database to ease file restoration
SYNOPSIS
dar_manager [-v] -C [<path>/]<database> [-z <algo>]
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -A [<path>/]<basename> [-9 <min-digits>]
[[<path>/]<archive_basename>]
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -l
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -D <number>[-<number>]
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -b <number> <new_archive_basename>
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -p <number> <path>
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -o [list of options to pass to dar]
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -d [<path to dar command>]
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> [-N] [-k] [-w <date>] [-e "<extra options to
dar>"] -r [list of files to restore]
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -u <number>
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -f file
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -s
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -m <number> <number>
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -c
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -i
dar_manager [-v] -B [<path>/]<database> -@ { <filename> | "-" }
dar_manager -h
dar_manager -V
DESCRIPTION
dar_manager is part of the Disk Archive suite. Its purpose is to simplify the restoration
of a set of files present in many backup, full or differential, eventually composed of a
set of binary delta patches. This is achieved by gathering the catalogue of each archive
(this has to be done once). Then, at any time you just have to give the relative path to
the files you want to restore, dar_manager will call dar with the proper options and
restore the last version of each file (or the last version before given date). Note that
dar_manager is especially interesting when you have removed some files by accident some
time ago and wish to recover them from a set of full and differential backups. It is thus
not really adapted/efficient to restore the state a full system had at a given time, in
particular when some files have to be removed. For that you would better use dar directly
with the corresponding archive(s) up to the date for which you wish to restore the state
of your Unix system.
You can restore any file by hand without dar_manager , but if you have a lot of
differential backups, you may spend a long time to find the archive that contains the last
version of your files. dar_manager simplify the process by looking in its internal
database, built from archive "catalogues" (= table of contents) it has been fed with.
COMMANDS
-C, --create [<path>/]<database>
creates an empty database that will collect information about several
archives. The <database> is a filename that is required for -B option.
To destroy a <database> just remove the file.
-B, --base [<path>/]<database>
specify the database to read or modify. The <database> file must
exist, and have a database structure (see -C option).
-i, --interactive use a keyboard interactive text menu to do operations on the given
database. So you may avoid reading the other options described in this
manual page, if you wish, and just use the interactive option. You
will however always have to create an empty database (-C option) and
restore files manually (-r option).
-A, --add [<path>/]<basename> [ [<path>/]<archive_basename>]
add an archive to the database. An isolated catalogue can also be used
only if it has been produced by dar version 1.2.0 or above. Why ?
Because, an isolated catalogue produced by older version will always
tell that no files are saved in the archive of reference, in that case
the solution is to provide the archive itself as argument. An optional
second argument is the basename of the archive if it is different from
the first argument (need for extraction of files). For example you
could have an isolated catalogue in first argument and the basename of
the original archive (where is stored the data) as second argument. By
default,
-9, --min-digits <num>
the slice number zeroed padding to use to get the slices filename (for
more details see dar man page at this same option) dar_manager will
look for an archive of reference in the command line used to create
each archive, but in some cases, it may be necessary to specify the
archive name (for example if you've changed its name).
-l, --list displays the information about the archives compiled in the database.
In particular, a number is given to each archive, which is required to
some other option to design a particular archive within the database.
Nothing avoids you to feed the database with several archive of the
same basename ! You will just have to guess which one is asked under
this name. :-)
-D, --delete <number>[-<number>]
removes an archive (or a range of archive) from the database. The
number of the archive (or the min and max number or the archive range)
is correspond to those given by the -l option. Note that all archive
number greater than the one(s) to be delete will be decremented to
keep continuous numbering of the archive inside the database. If a
single number is given (not a range), it may be also a negative
number, by which it means counting from the end. For example, -1 means
the last archive of the base, -2 the penultimate, etc.
-b, --basename <number> <new_archive_basename>
this option allows you to rename the archive basename (used when
restoring files from it). Here too, the number may be also a negative
number.
-p, --path <number> <path>
this option allows you to change the location of a given archive (used
when restoring files from it). Here too, a negative number is allowed.
-o, --options [list of option to pass to dar]
Specify the option to use when calling dar. Each call erases the
previous setting. Possible dar options are all the available ones
except "-x" and simple arguments (the [list of path]) which will be
added by dar_manager itself.
-d, --dar [<path>] Set the path to dar. If no argument is given, dar is expected to be
located in the PATH
-r, --restore [list of files or directories to restore]
dar_manager will restore all (an only) the given files or directories,
in their latest recorded status, or before the date give thanks to the
-e option. If a directory is given all subfiles and subdirectories are
restored recursively in it. You can filter out some files from this
recursion thanks to dar usual filtering option (see dar man page) you
can provide beside -r using the -e option (see below). Dar_manager
lead dar to remove any file, if a file is stored as having been
removed at date requested for restoration, it is simply not restored.
Thus if you restore in an empty directory you will get all the files
and directories you provided to dar_manager in the state they have at
the date you asked. File that did not existed at that time will not be
restored. However you can restore over an existing installation, dar
will then warn you before overwriting files (see -w and -n options for
dar) but will still not remove files that were recorded removed from a
previous archive of reference. Note that files listed after -r
option, must never have an absolute path. They will be restored under
the directory specified with -R option of dar (passed to dar using -o
or -e options), or by default, under the current directory.
-w, --when <date> alters the -r option behavior: still restores the files in the most
recent version available but only before the given date (versions of
more recent dates are ignored). The <date> must respect the following
format [ [ [year/]month/]day-]hour:minute[:second]. For example
"22:10" for 10 PM past 10 or the current day, "7-22:10" for 10 PM
past 10 the 7th of the current month, "3/07-22:10" for the 7th of
march at 22:10 of the current year, "2002/03/31-14:00:00" the date of
the first dar's release ;-). The given date must be in the past, of
course, and is compared to the "last modification" date of the saved
files and not to the date at which archives have been done. Thus if a
file has been changed long ago but saved in a recent (full) archive,
it will be elected for restoration even for dates older than the
creation of the archive. In the other way, a file saved long time ago
with a mtime that was set to a date in the future will not be elected
for restoration when giving the date at which was done the archive.
Note that the provided date is relative to the system timezone which is overriden
if the TZ environement variable is set (see tzselect(1) for more details)
-e, --extra <options>
pass some more options to dar. While the -o options takes all that
follows on the command line as argument to pass to dar and write these
in the database, the -e option does not alter the database and has
only one argument. In other words, if you need to pass several options
to dar through the use of the -e option, you need to use quotes
(simple quotes ' or double quotes ") to enclose these options.
Example:
dar_manager -B database.dmd -e "-w -v -p -b -r -H 1" -r some/files
while using -o option you must not use quotes:
dar_manager -B database.dmd -o -w -v -p -b -r -H 1
-u, --used <number> list the files that the given archive owns as last version available.
Thus when no file is listed, the given archive is no more useful in
database, and can be removed safely (-D option). If <number> is zero,
all available file are listed, the status provided for each file
present in the database is the most recent status. A negative number
is allowed for this option (see -D option for details).
-f, --file <file> displays in which archive the given file is saved, and what are the
modification date (mtime) and change date (ctime).
-s, --stats show the number of most recent files by archive. This helps to
determine which archive can be safely removed from the database.
-m, --move <number> <number>
changes the order of archives in the database. The first number is the
number of the archive to move, while the second is the place where it
must be shifted to.
Archive order is important: An old archive must have a smaller index
than a recent archive. If you add archive to a database in the order
they have been created all should be fine. Else if a file has a more
recent version in an archive which index is smaller, a warning will be
issued (unless -ai option is used). This can occur if by mistake you
added an archive to the database in the wrong order (old archive added
after a recent one), in that case simply using the -m option will let
you fix this mistake. If instead the problem is relative to a single
file (or a small set of file), you should wonder why this file has its
modification date altered in a way that it pretends to be older than
its really is. Checking for the signs of a rootkit may be a good idea.
-c, --check check the database consistency, in particular the date ordering is
verified and warning are issued for each file having more recent
version located in an archive with a smaller index inside the
database. -ai option makes -c option useless.
-N, --ignore-options-in-base
Do not use the options stored in database when calling dar for
restoration. This option is only useful while restoring files from
dar_manager, either directly (-r option) or using a batch file (-@
option, see below).
-k, --ignore-when-removed
By default, dar_manager does not ask dar to restore file that have
been removed at the requested date (or in the latest state available).
This is useful for example to restore a directory in the state it has
at a given date (only files that existed at that time are restored).
However when you want to restore a file that has been destroyed by
accident, you need to use -k option so you don't have to determine at
which date that file existed to be be able to ask dar_manager to
restore that file in the state it had before that date. In other
words, -k option gives a behavior of dar_manager backward compatible
with dar_manager released beside version 2.3.x of dar.
-ai, --alter=ignore-order
avoid dar_manager to issue a warning for each file not following a
chronological order of modification date when the archive number in
the database is growing.
-@, --batch <filename>
allows you to do several operations on a given database. All
operations are defined in the provided <filename> and refer to the
same database as defined by the -B switch on command line. This batch
file, must thus not contain neither -B, -C, -i or -ai option (-ai are
global to the batch operation). The batch file expected layout is one
command per line, thus several arguments (like -l -v for example) may
take place on a given line of the file (-v can be found both on
command line for verbose output about the batch operation steps, as
well as inside the batch file for verbose output of a particular
batched command). Arguments are separated by spaces or tabs, other
characters are passed as-is. In consequence, you should only need to
use quotes (using " or ') if you intend to use an argument containing
space. Last, comments may be placed on any line beginning by a hash
character (#).
-z, --compression <algo>[:<level>]
Available creating or modifying a database content (-C, -A, -D, -m,
-i, -L options), this option let you set the compression algorithm and
eventually the compression level to use when the database is wrote to
file. By default gzip:9 is use, but you can use "none" for no
compression, "bzip2", "xz" and "lzo" and other compression algorithms
(see -z option in dar's man page for an up to date list of available
algorithms). Note: this option is only needed if you want to *change*
the compression algorithm or level. Once defined, either at database
creation time using -C option, or modified afterward, the compression
scheme is stored in the database header and used for writing down
database back to file.
-Q Do not display any message on stderr when not launched from a terminal
(for example when launched from an at job or crontab). Remains that
any question to the user will be assumed a 'no' answer, which most of
the time will abort the program.
-v, --verbose displays additional information about what it is doing.
-h, --help display help usage
-V, --version display software version
EXIT CODES
dar_manager exits with the following code:
0 Operation successful.
1 see dar manual page for signification
2 see dar manual page for signification
3 see dar manual page for signification
5 see dar manual page for signification
7 see dar manual page for signification
8 see dar manual page for signification
11 and above
dar
called from dar_manager has exited with non zero status. Subtract 10 to this
exit code to get dar's exit code.
SIGNALS
dar_manager acts like dar (see dar man page for list of signals), upon certain signal
reception dar aborts cleanly
SEE ALSO
dar(1), dar_xform(1), dar_slave(1), dar_cp(1), dar_split(1)
LIMITATIONS
at most 65534 archives can be compiled in a given database, which should be enough for
most users. Dar_manager does not support encrypted archives for now and archive cannot
neither be encrypted. See the FAQ for a workaround.
KNOWN BUGS
http://sourceforge.net/p/dar/bugs/
AUTHOR
http://dar.linux.free.fr/
Denis Corbin
France
Europe