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From: Alec Kloss <alec@d2si.com>
Message-Id: <199702190227.UAA05742@d2si.com>
Subject: Re: Backup questions?
To: burton@bsampley (Burton Sampley)
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 20:27:24 -0600 (CST)
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.970218154218.233B-100000@bsampley.vip.best.com> from Burton Sampley at "Feb 18, 97 04:02:05 pm"
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Burton Sampley is responsible for:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm running 3.0-current with 2 EIDE hard drives.  Is it possible to take 
> a snapshot of the entire first hard drive, compress it into 1 file and 
> store it in the 2nd hard drive?  If so, what's the best way to do this?  
> I searched the freebsd archives but I could only find info for creating 
> tar or dump files to tape.
> 
> The reason I'm doing this is, I want to periodically take a snapshot of 
> the entire system as a backup and store it on the 2nd drive which is 
> currently not being used.  If for some reason I screw up another upgade 
> (like I did going from 2.2 -Beta --> 3.0 current) I want to restore the 
> primary drive from 2.1.5R CDROM with a minimum installation and then 
> take the most recent copy from the 2nd disk and umcompress it on top of 
> the minimal install on the 1st drive.  Am I crazy (or stupid) for 
> attempting this?
	[snip]
Hey, if you've got the extra disk, use it however you like.  Both dump
and tar should be able to do this.  For your purposes I expect that
dump is the better option.  Lookup the f option in the man page for
dump.