[cobalt-users] Did anyone ever successfully restore a Raq4r?

["Eric Frisch" <ericf@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Being a bit paranoid I have been attempting to do a disaster recovery of a
Raq4 before putting it into production.  I have backed up using both the
built-in tools both by web and FTP, uploaded the .raq files via FTP to a
fresh machine loaded from the recovery CD.  The restore only works for maybe
half the files and "unknown error" is shown for the rest.  Next I took the
hack approach and stripped the headers off of the .raq file and restored the
tar archive using the same parameters used by the Cobalt CGI, that got back
all the missing files but now "Site Management" in the GUI is broken.  Seems
the site management Perl script is having trouble accessing the Postgres
config database (exec failures on sql commands), the database is running
though.  (Maybe the backup script didn't capture everything needed for
recovery???)

I called support and didn't get much info, they told me to recreate all the
virtual sites by hand in the order that they were originally created before
doing a restore.  I had no virtual sites, just a couple of admin users
configured under the main site. (I hate the concept of reconfiguring stuff
much beyond partitioning disks for recovery, it is error prone, slow and
requires piles of configuration management/control.  That is what backups
are for in the first place. - end of rant).

Is a clean disaster recovery possible with the Cobalt backup/restore scheme,
is there a trick or something that I am missing?

Thanks in advance . . .

Eric