From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Aug 14 23:32:13 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (cfedde.dsl.frii.net [216.17.139.141]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C32C937B406 for ; Tue, 14 Aug 2001 23:32:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cfedde@fedde.littleton.co.us) Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fedde.littleton.co.us (8.11.4/8.11.4) with ESMTP id f7F6W6493412; Wed, 15 Aug 2001 00:32:07 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <200108150632.f7F6W6493412@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: "Kory Hamzeh" Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Backup suggestions In-Reply-To: <005f01c1252f$8bd0eba0$14ce21c7@avatar.com> From: Chris Fedde Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 00:32:06 -0600 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 14 Aug 2001 19:11:08 -0700 "Kory Hamzeh" wrote: +------------------ | Hi, | | I am setting up a system running 4.3-RELEASE. This system will have two IDE | drives, each being about 30G. I would like to write a cron jobs to copy all | of the filesystems from the first physical drive to the second one every | night. I want to make sure the second drive is an exact duplicate of the | first, so in case of a crash, I can make the second drive the master and | boot off of it. +------------------ My experiance is that these schemes don't help much. You need to edit /etc/fstab and other files so that the system will boot as expected anyway. IMHO a better plan is to have /, swap, /var, and /usr partitions identical on both drives. Make sure the system normaly uses both swap partitions. make / as small as is reasonable (say 100meg) make /usr no larger than it realy needs to be (say 5G) Install your "running" operating system onto /, /var and /usr of drive one. install your "recovery" operating system onto drive 2. Make a /disk directory and mount the remaining disk on both drives as /disk/1 and /disk/2 on the "running" disk. Make liberal use of symbolic links to balance /home and other directories over the /disk/1 and /disk/2 partitions. Use dump to write dumpfiles of the "running" partitions to /disk/2/backups Use tar (or pax) to backup home directories and other precious data to /disk/[12]/user_backup. Use newsyslog to keep a few old copies of backup data. Use scp or sync to copy the backup directories to a second computer. Test your backups periodicaly. Test boot your "recovery" operating system periodicaly. Good Luck -- Chris Fedde To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message