[news.software.b] Active file munged

dan@kfw.COM (Dan Mick) (12/01/90)

We're running C News, and last night my active file got hosed due to an 
unrecoverable disk error (sigh).  

What should I have done to repair it? 

What I did was 

cp active.old active
recovact active
upact 

and then rn dumped core when I tried to get in...until I updated some 
ridiculous things in .newsrc.  God knows how they got there.

Anyway, was that the safest way to recover?

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (12/02/90)

In article <1990Dec1.012829.7501@kfw.COM> dan@kfw.com (Dan Mick) writes:
>We're running C News, and last night my active file got hosed due to an 
>unrecoverable disk error (sigh).  
>
>What should I have done to repair it? 
>
>What I did was 
>
>cp active.old active
>recovact active
>upact 

This is about the best you can do.  It's an inherently difficult situation.

(Actually, I hadn't thought of using active.old for disaster recovery --
it's left around as sort of a side effect of the paranoia of the code in
upact/updatemin -- but that's a sensible use for it.)

(Dept. Of Real Trivia:  recovact does not take an argument.)
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry