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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2016 01:52:12 +0200
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: jd1008 <jd1008@gmail.com>
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: ufs to zfs
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On Mon, 24 Oct 2016 12:58:11 -0600, jd1008 wrote:
> The OP says he does have an external drive which the bios does not allow 
> booting from.
> He can he back up  (tar) the current system that is UFS based to the 
> external drive,
> clobber the ufs partition by simply formatting it as a ZFS partition, 
> and at some
> point, (after appropriate admin of zfs partition), tar the system back 
> into the zfs partition.
> Is this "doable"? (Pardon the bad "english").

Follow-up question:

Would it be technically possible to obtain the UFS data using
the "dump" program, then mount the (newly created) ZFS target
and use "restore" to the target directory?

I've been using tar and cpio, but would the dump | restore
approach be possible too, even though it's usually intended
for UFS? If I understand things correctly, dump operates
block-wise on the file system level (and therefore prefers
an unmounted partition), while restore works file-wise and
needs an initialized and mounted file system to output the
files. Would restore work if the target file system is ZFS?
Does it care?


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...