On 06/09/12 00:58, Warren Block wrote:
On Fri, 8 Jun 2012, Robert Huff wrote:
Ronald F. Guilmette writes:
I got a lot of disks here, so that part is not a problem. I just
need to make sure that I'm gonna do this the Right Way[tm].
(I've already been making my own ham-fisted disk-to-disk backups
in the past, but I'm sure that the way I have been doing that is
sub-optimal, so I'm here seeking knowledge of how to do this the
Right Way.)
The bottom line is this... I know how to use cpio, and would like
to use it to create a complete and _bootable_ backup of my main
system disk. (My main system disk has only one BIOS partition,
and that is sub-divided into the usual set of FreeBSD partitions,
you know, /, /dev, /tmp, /usr, /var, /usr/compat/linux/proc, and
/var/named/dev.)
As far as I know, the only way guaranteed to preserve metadata
is dump/restore. See previous (not necessarily recent) discussion
(on this list, and possibly in the Handbook) for more information.
The rsync port has a flags option. I haven't tried it for a full backup.
Even if it can copy all filesystem attributes like dump, there are still
non-filesystem things needed for booting that neither can copy, like
partition tables and boot blocks.
There's a BFI (brute force and ignorance) way of doing it in the base
system - dd. Provided your system disk is quiescent (ideally when
running from a live CD or all partitions mounted read-only, otherwise
pray to the deity of your choice) and the backup disk is a) at least as
large as the system disk, and b) has the same sector size, then a simple
dd from the system disk to the backup should work.
[Greybeard war story:] Going back about 25-30 years, a friend of mine
was responsible for running the Unix systems in an EE department of a UK
university. He used to back up the disks (probably around 10 MB in those
days) to 1/2" tape every night. Eventually he got sick of undergraduates
asking him to restore files they'd accidentally deleted, and hit upon
the idea of dd'ing the disk to tape, and then if a student wanted a
restore, he'd mount the tape as a r/o file system (these were the days
of tape block devices and trusting all users) and tell them to use
restore to get the files themselves. It took forever, but it was the
student's time that was wasted, not his. Most of them learned not to
delete wanted files after one or two times of doing this.
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