A couple of weeks ago I took a snapshot of my 1 GB linode after I had set it up the way I wanted it. After I created that snapshot, I decided (wrongly, as it turns out) to split my main partition up into four smaller partitions. Yesterday I decided to merge the various disk partitions I had created into one large disk partition. If I take another snapshot, will it restore my server using my new disk configuration (i.e. one large partition instead of four smaller ones) or will it install the snapshot back into a VPS that uses the default disk layout (i.e. one 776 MB disk image and one 256 MB swap image) and thus require me to resize my main disk again? I'd rather not mess up my current snapshot to find out.

Thanks.

The backups (and snapshot) are a full dump of your Linode, including all configuration profiles and disk image contents, so restoring sets up the same configuration as when the backup/snapshot took place. It's designed to serve as the Linode equivalent of a bare metal restore (although the disk images are backed up as files and not blocks).

You can see this by clicking on one of the restore options (don't worry, it won't do anything immediately) where it will show you the profiles and disk configuration included in that backup.

Note also that a restore doesn't overwrite any existing profiles or disk images - rather it creates new profiles and images with the original names from the backup, but prefixed with a "Restore ###" where ### is, if I recall, the job number.

Oh, one other thing - if I recall correctly, the newly restored disk images are created only a bit larger than the actual space needed, rather than their full backup size. You're shown both (original size, and restoration size needed, on the restore screen). This has the advantage of requiring the least unallocated space on the restoration Linode, but does mean you may need to manually extend them out to their original size after the restoration.

If you want to get some experience with the restore process (never a bad idea for a backup system), a simple way is to add a new Linode in the same data center, then test restoring before and after the extra snapshot. Then just delete the extra Linode.

-- David

David, thanks for your detailed reply. I appreciate your taking the time and I'll follow your recommendations.