That’s a pretty well-known warning. It’s standard and the lines identified are actually doing the thing that this does right.
Bah, ok.
So lets hit this from a different angle.
How do you do a proper restore? Because apparently I am doing it wrong. So very wrong.
The way I do it (because of all the problems I’ve seen with Backup and Restore over the years) is as follows:
- Copy and paste the Trunk definitions.
- Copy and past the Inbound and Outbound routes.
- Use Bulk Handler (or the older Import Extensions) to copy out the current configuration.
Put these on a disk/usb/dead tree and spin up the new server.
Reproduce the Trunk definition.
Copy in the Inbound and Outbound routes.
Import the extensions from the Bulk Display.
Ah so you have totally abandoned the Backup and Restore app?
Yeah - there are just too many vagaries to deal with. Because of the nature of the databases in question, there’s little chance that your backup is going to restore anywhere but the exact version of the system you are currently running.
Well I have a feeling that in this case my issue might be the fact that the original system is Asterisk V11 and the new is Asterisk V13. If I go with that thought process I could always switch the Asterisk version on the original system to v13. However I have never done that with a prod system. Is that advisable or should I avoid that?
Thanks again for all your help.
Doing the upgrade is more reliable that backup and restore.
Do a full-system backup of the old system (down to bare metal) and do the upgrade through the scripts. It’s been tried and vetted many times and should work flawlessly. At the end of the process, check the versions on everything. If they match, you can backup and restore the old system onto the new hardware.
That should probably work.
Thanks for the info. It is greatly appreciated.
I will do that this evening once that office empties out for the day and then I will report back.
Thanks again.
Dave, I went to switch from Asterisk 11 to 13. But when I kick off the script it states the swap to 13 is experimental. I assume this because of the age of the distro? It is currently 6.12.65-20. Does this mean I need to upgrade the distro (sooo many scripts) or is there an updated switch script I can snag someplace? I see I can pull an newer one off of one of my newer systems but I am not sure if there are related dependencies. Any advice on this? Thanks.
Check back through the discussion archives. I’m pretty sure Lorne @lgaetz and Andrew @tm1000 have covered this in grisly detail a couple of times. Since I don’t upgrade this way (I just build a new machine hand jam the stuff that doesn’t come in from the Bulk Handler), I don’t have any experience. All I’ve got is the experiences of others who’ve posted their successes.
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Just an update. I just ran the switch script to 13. I notice it ends up at 13.9 whereas my destination system is 13.11 (I figure that is a diff between the distro versions) . In any case I still get the same thing where the conf files don’t get created with the config db info.
At this point I am just super curious if I can make this work at all. So I will run all the scripts on the original system to bring it up the the same distro version as the new box. Then I will try again.
Dave, I tried your method just to see if maybe the image I was using was broken vs. the backup process being the issue. Your method via the bulk handler worked the first time. Thanks for suggesting that. I will just manually recreate the system in question and export/import what I can. To many variables in play for backup to work.
Here is my take away from this (in case anyone is reading this)
-Backup and Restore can be useful but only seems to be reliable when versions of everything are the same
Different Distro versions, different asterisk versions etc will trip it up and make a huge mess
-In the event you are in the situation I am in (trying to backup/restore an older system that has gone through multiple upgrades of FreePBX and such) Dave’s method is far superior. There is more work for you to do but it will still save time and you come away with a clean and functioning system that you don’t have to worry about.
Thanks again to Dave for all his help on this it is VERY much appreciated.
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