Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:42:00 -0700 From: Nerius Landys <nlandys@gmail.com> To: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Best procedure for full backup of live system Message-ID: <560f92640910151742h33393131j9974c23db37602b8@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20091015143947.GB54613@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> References: <560f92640910142042tc46f1e3lb81ac1e4528a44ab@mail.gmail.com> <20091015143947.GB54613@gizmo.acns.msu.edu>
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Thanks for your help guys. I have decided to attempt the following. With a filesystem snapshot, take a dump 0 of all filesystems. Back up these dumps to a 500GB disk I have sitting at home (the server I'm backing up is in a data center). Perform this maybe once a week or once a month. I am now looking at this: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/backup-basics.html#AEN25994 For step 1, I'm a little unsure what they are talking about. I assume that to begin with I would do this: > bsdlabel ad4s1 Since that is my disk and it has one partition. I would probably also want to do this: > dd if=/dev/ad4 of=MBR_backup bs=512 count=1 to back up the MBR, so I can recontruct the boot program and partition table. But they don't mention that in the Handbook. Then it says to back up /etc/fstab, but I'm not quite sure how I'd use this in a restore. Lastly, it says save all boot messages. Do they mean the output of dmesg? Why is this useful? Of course I would complement all of these things with the actual dump 0 of all sectors on the primary partition of the single hard drive that I have. My server should boot fine with the FreeBSD CDROM (fixit), because it uses a subset of the GENERIC kernel device drivers. So I probably don't need to pay attention to the instuctions talking about floppies. Am I correct in all of this?
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