Here's my scenario:
I have a system that we are running in production that there was an oversight
on, and it has a single hard drive installed (32GB SCSI I believe), rather
than a 3 drive raid5 array. We would like to correct this, but we have all
sorts of up-to-date packages and config files that we've tweaked that we
would hate to just start over on it.
There's a tool for OSX called "Carbon Copy Cloner" that would take care of
this for me, which is basically a series of copy commands that takes the
filesystem from one drive to another, preserving EVERYTHING important, and
then bless the boot volume.
Is there anything similar I can do on FreeBSD? My boss thinks I should be
able to tar up the entire filesystem, create the raid array, and untar the
whole thing on the new array. I seem to think this will fail due to block
devices that have changed, fstab entries that have changed (though this is
correctable), and symlinks that don't nicely come across.
Not that I do this a lot, but I think you'll run into problems using tar,
cp, and rsync when it comes to various special files or files with holes
in them (sparse files). I've always read that dump/restore is the safest
way to do something like this.
When I have done it, I boot off of a live CD on the server in question.
Then somewhere else I have an NFS server running. Mount the share on your
live CD box. dump each partition to the share.
Then install the new hard disks...
Then boot the box off the live cd again, mount the share, do whatever
fdisk'ing and disklabel'ing and newfs'ing is necessary to get the
partitions you want and restore each of the dumps (in the right order of
course).
It's worked for me...
-philip
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