copying wordlists

[Matthias Andree]

Dave Lovelace <dave at firstcomp.biz> writes:

> David Relson wrote, in part:
>> ... .  For one, there's the new idea of a
>> "database environment" with attendant status files, e.g. __db.*,
>> lockfile-*, etc and log files.  Simply copying wordlist.db from one
>> place to another is not a good idea.  Scripts bf_copy and bf_compact are
>> available on sourceforge.  
>> 
>
> Something occurs to me, given what was said a while back about needing to
> use dd instead of cp to copy database stuff now:  What will happen if
> files are restored from a (tar-style) tape backup?  Will they have
> problems?

The problem is with incompletely updated database pages.

If you've stopped the software before making the backup, everything will
be fine. If you've happened to hit (read) the file in the moment that
some bogofilter or bogoutil process is reading it, the page is dead in
the water on many systems.

Knowing that, bogofilter 0.93.* requests page checksums at database
creation, so if you have _created_ the database with DB 4.1 or newer
(4.0 and older versions do not support this feature), running recovery
after restoring the backup is supposed to fix these things up. I haven't
tried that though.

(Is someone collecting these recovery-copy-and-compaction questions?
We'll need to put them into our FAQ.)

-- 
Matthias Andree