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From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:19:43 -0500
In-Reply-To: <1199040464.7325.38.camel@columbus.webtent.org> (Robert
	Fitzpatrick's message of "Sun\, 30 Dec 2007 13\:47\:44 -0500")
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Cc: Darren Spruell <phatbuckett@gmail.com>,
	FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Imaging to new system
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Robert Fitzpatrick <lists@webtent.net> writes:

> On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 11:10 -0700, Darren Spruell wrote:
>> On Dec 30, 2007 10:54 AM, Robert Fitzpatrick <lists@webtent.net> wrote:
>> > I have a server running 5.4-RELEASE using RAID-5 on an Intel RAID
>> > controller that I need to move to faster RAID. Is it possible to image
>> > or some other way to save the current install and restore after setting
>> > up the RAID or should I just plan to reinstall everything?
>> 
>> Running dump(8) and restore(8) would allow you to back up and restore
>> your system.
>> 
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dump
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=restore
>> 
>> This is typically used with tape, although you can dump to disk as well.
>> 
>> If your data/system is critical, you ought to already have some backup
>> strategy you could restore the system from to your new RAID. If not,
>> you might put one in place (RAID != backups).
>> 
>
> Yes, of course, we have data backup and can restore after reinstalling
> everything, but I was looking for a complete system restore option. I'll
> look into these docs, thanks. There is no tape system, so I guess the
> only hope is if it can be dumped and restored from an NFS drive. From
> looking at the docs, it does appear this is possible, as long as the
> data in on a fs mounted by fstab?

Another possibility is to dump to stdout, and pipe that over ssh.