Backing up my system

[Bill Moran]

Christopher J.Utley wrote:
> I've just inherrited a FreeBSD system with an internal RAID setup.  
> There is about 100GB of system and application data.  I am looking for a 
> way to back-up a snapshot of the entire filesystem so that I could 
> restore everything in the event the box were to blow up or something.  I 
> would want to replicate the partitioning scheme, but not necessarily the 
> RAID configuration.
> 
> I'm already backing up my application data nightly, but what I really 
> want is a weekly copy of the whole thing, so I wouldn't have to 
> reinstall the entire system and data in order to get up and running again.
> 
> Any suggestions on how to do this most effectively would be appreciated.

You can use dump/tar to back up the actual data.

You can use disklabel and fdisk to dump the current partition scheme to
a text file prior to backing up.

Then, if you needed to restore/rebuild from scratch, you could boot a
CD (such as FreeSBIE) partition the new disk based on the disklabel/
fdisk dumps you made prior, then use restore/tar to restore the
actual data.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com