On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Nerius Landys wrote:
Thanks for your help guys. I have decided to attempt the following.
With a filesystem snapshot, take a dump 0 of all filesystems. Back up
these dumps to a 500GB disk I have sitting at home (the server I'm
backing up is in a data center). Perform this maybe once a week or
once a month.
Just a general note: backup to a hard drive isn't bad, but it's not the
same as removable media. One failure can kill all of your backups...
I am now looking at this:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/backup-basics.html#AEN25994
For step 1, I'm a little unsure what they are talking about. I assume
that to begin with I would do this:
> bsdlabel ad4s1
Since that is my disk and it has one partition.
The first step there has you print out the bsdlabel. That can be
valuable because it's a lot easier to have that information on hand than
to try to reconstruct it after a failure.
I would probably also want to do this:
> dd if=/dev/ad4 of=MBR_backup bs=512 count=1
Handy to have, and takes little space.
to back up the MBR, so I can recontruct the boot program and partition
table. But they don't mention that in the Handbook.
Then it says to back up /etc/fstab, but I'm not quite sure how I'd use
this in a restore.
Mostly it's reference information you might need after a failure, to see
which partition goes to which mountpoint: "Aha! On that drive, /usr is
s1g, not s1f."
Lastly, it says save all boot messages. Do they mean the output of
dmesg? Why is this useful?
It would show what hardware was in the old machine and what services are
running on startup. Backup in general is making copies of information
you won't need as long as you have a backup of it.
Of course I would complement all of these things with the actual dump
0 of all sectors on the primary partition of the single hard drive
that I have.
dump(8) doesn't do all sectors, just ones used by the filesystem.
Also, dump doesn't cross filesystems. In a typical FreeBSD install, /,
/var, and /usr are separate filesystems. A dump of / won't get them all
at once.
My server should boot fine with the FreeBSD CDROM (fixit), because it
uses a subset of the GENERIC kernel device drivers.
If you can, try that before an actual emergency.
So I probably don't need to pay attention to the instuctions talking
about floppies.
Not any more. A full FreeBSD install CD or DVD along with the fixit
gives a lot more options.
-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA
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