From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Apr 20 12:26:27 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D7DE716A4CE for ; Tue, 20 Apr 2004 12:26:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from internet.potentialtech.com (h-66-167-251-6.phlapafg.covad.net [66.167.251.6]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B0EB443D48 for ; Tue, 20 Apr 2004 12:26:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com (pa-plum1c-102.pit.adelphia.net [24.53.179.102]) by internet.potentialtech.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 04BA169A71; Tue, 20 Apr 2004 15:26:27 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <4085795F.3060905@potentialtech.com> Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 15:26:23 -0400 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031005 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Christopher J.Utley" References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Backing up my system X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 19:26:28 -0000 Christopher J.Utley wrote: > I've just inherrited a FreeBSD system with an internal RAID setup. > There is about 100GB of system and application data. I am looking for a > way to back-up a snapshot of the entire filesystem so that I could > restore everything in the event the box were to blow up or something. I > would want to replicate the partitioning scheme, but not necessarily the > RAID configuration. > > I'm already backing up my application data nightly, but what I really > want is a weekly copy of the whole thing, so I wouldn't have to > reinstall the entire system and data in order to get up and running again. > > Any suggestions on how to do this most effectively would be appreciated. You can use dump/tar to back up the actual data. You can use disklabel and fdisk to dump the current partition scheme to a text file prior to backing up. Then, if you needed to restore/rebuild from scratch, you could boot a CD (such as FreeSBIE) partition the new disk based on the disklabel/ fdisk dumps you made prior, then use restore/tar to restore the actual data. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com