pctl recover and pctl reinstall

These commands are used to restore the original state of Container system and application files (to be more precise, of VZFS symlinks in the Container private area to system and application templates) if the Container gets broken for some reason. These are restored to the state as they were at the time when the Container was created and/or when other applications were added to the Container afterwards.

The difference between these two commands lies in the way the symlinks are restored. Whereas the pctl recover command simply rewrites the original symlinks to the Container private area (leaving the user files intact), the pctl reinstall command creates a new private area for the Container and re-writes the Container from scratch using its configuration files (thus retaining the Container IP address, hostname, resource control parameters, and all the other settings). The contents of the Container old private area are then copied to the /old directory in the new private area, to retain the user files.

The syntax of these commands is as follows:

pctl recover < CT_ID > [ options ]

pctl reinstall < CT_ID > [ options ]

The available options are listed below:

Note: If any of the Container application templates cannot be added to the Container in a normal way, the reinstallation process will fail. This may happen, for example, if an application template was added to the Container using the --force option of the vzpkgadd command.