Did My IFL Restore Work Perfectly?

[Muad'Dib]

Thankfully, I run backups much more often than I run restores. But this means I am less familiar with the various restore steps and settings. I ran a restore a few days ago, and I want to know if there's a way to know for sure that EVERYTHING was successfully restored. Here are my questions (relates to running IFL (v3.41) restore on a bootable thumb drive created with MakeDisk):

1) Does the "Reboot on Completion" option actually mean "Reboot on SUCCESSFUL Completion"? In other words, if there are errors during the restore, the system doesn't reboot?

2) Can you explain where to find the IFL.LOG file (created after running a restore) on the IFL thumb drive? Ideally, where can I find it while examining the drive under Windows? I'm not that familiar with Linux, so if it's only viewable from Linux, then please step me through it.

Here's the scenario:

Because of the pandemic, I have been working remotely from home. At work, a boot drive on a W10 machine was having problems that didn't allow users to logon. From home, I worked with someone from our IT department who was on-site. After several unsuccessful attempts to fix the problem, I decided to restore from a backup I had created using IFW (the backup was created a day before the logon problems started). The IT person removed the original boot drive and put in a different blank drive in the computer. The original was an SSD, the replacement was an HDD (the only drive available at the time). We plan to restore back to a new SSD once it arrives.

Since this was a restoration to the boot drive, I had the IT person boot from an IFL thumb drive I had created (running the same version number of Image as the IFW I used to create backups). FYI, the IFL drive had been created with default settings (except for entering the user name and product key). Since the IT person was unfamiliar with TBU software, I stepped them through the various restore steps (relying heavily on the IFL documentation). We enabled the following options:

"Validate Byte-for-Byte" (this was also enabled when creating the backup)
"Reboot When Completed" (the reboot was desired for reasons explained below)
"Log Results to File"

NOTE: "Scale to Fit" and/or "Compact Data" may have also been enabled, I don't remember at the moment, but I don't think this is relevant to my questions (if it is relevant, let me know and I'll find out).

After a few false starts (mainly due to minor size discrepancies and related settings, which resulted in immediate errors that wouldn't let the restore begin), the restore started proceeding normally. The restore had begun in the evening, and since the only way I could tell if the restore was successful (without having to wait until the next morning for someone to check on site), was to have the system reboot (a reboot to a normally running system would allow me to access the system remotely).

After a couple of hours, the system rebooted and I was able to successfully remotely logon to this machine. Everything looks fine, and the application software all seems to be working normally, but because I had no way to monitor the ongoing progress of the restore from home, I was relying on checking the IFL.LOG file to see if there were any issues. But I can't find any IFL.LOG file (either on the thumb drive, or any drive on the system). I realize that since the restore/reboot allowed me to successfully logon to the system, the Windows components PROBABLY are all fine. However, this computer runs laboratory equipment, and I'd like to know for sure that there weren't any files related to the that software that may not have been successfully restored (but may not be immediately detectable).

FYI, I looked for the IFL.LOG file on the thumb drive via Windows Explorer and a DOS window but couldn't find it. Since the thumb drive was not write-protected, I would have thought that it qualifies as a "writable medium" as mentioned in the documentation.

So this explains why I'd like answers to the questions posted at the top of this post.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

By default, an error message would cancel the reboot.

The log file is saved in the running Linux file system (/tbu/ifl.log), which is in RAM, and is lost when the system is shut down or restarted. You would need to copy it out first if you wanted to save it.

[Muad'Dib]

>>"By default, an error message would cancel the reboot."

Thanks Paul, that makes complete sense. But since the documentation doesn't say anything about that, and since I needed to be sure that my restore was completely successful, I wanted to verify it. Might I suggest that the doc be updated to explain that this option means "Reboot (or Shutdown) When Successfully Completed"? That would make things much clearer. Or until then, maybe add something to the Knowledgebase about this.

>>"The log file is saved in the running Linux file system (/tbu/ifl.log), which is in RAM, and is lost when the system is shut down or restarted. You would need to copy it out first if you wanted to save it."

The fact that you can simultaneously enable BOTH "Reboot When Completed" and "Log Results to File" seems counterintuitive. If it reboots (or shuts down), the log file is gone. Again, maybe the doc should explain that about the file being lost. For those of us steeped in Windows culture, and only use Linux to run IFL, the term "Log Results to File" seems more permanent. Especially when the doc says: "To be able to save ifl.log, Image for Linux must be running from a writable medium." To me that says if you run IFL from a CD, nothing will be saved, but if you run it from a thumb drive, the file is going to remain on the drive until we delete it (or it gets overwritten). Nothing is mentioned about it being saved only to RAM.

Thanks again, this saves me much time, by not having to again run Restore from the original backup set (without rebooting), and then having someone come in the next morning to verify it was successful.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

If you would like IFL to save to a log file on the UFD you can configure it to do that when creating the boot media. Select to create the "Traditional ... (Custom)" build. Continue through the steps until you reach the "Additional ifl.ini Options" page. Enter the following text into the top edit control:

LogFile=/tbu/boot/ifl.log

Continue with the steps until the "Boot Option - Mounting" page. Select the "Leave Boot Drive Mounted as /tbu/boot" option. Then finish creating the boot media normally.

Doing the above will set the "LogFile" setting in the INI file to save to the mounted IFL UFD at the /tbu/boot location (this will be the root folder of the UFD). Note that you would need to leave the UFD plugged in after booting IFL for this to work.