backup

[Steven N. Fettig]

I think there are better ways per se, but that is usually personal 
opinion...  That being said, there are a few questions: 1) how big of an 
installation are you trying to back up? 2) is it necessary to back up 
all of the information? 3) do you have access to a faster drive (this 
one may not be relevant, as you may have no other option)?

The handbook has a good primer on backing up FreeBSD using dump, tar and 
cpio at:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/backup-basics.html
Given the slow speed of USB 1.0 and assuming you are backing up a 
relatively large amount of data, you might want to try compressing your 
backup so that it does not take up so much space and therefore is able 
to made faster.
A full dump backup of the /usr directory or slice is certainly 
advisable.  You could do a compressed dump backup via:
dump -0uan -f - /usr | gzip > /volume_to_backup_to/usr_backup_date.gz
If needed, you can then do this to all of the primary volumes/slices on 
your system (look at fstab if you aren't sure which are primary slices).
You would need to use piping to restore the backup, though and that can 
get tricky if your new system that you need to restore the data to isn't 
sized the same as the old and isn't using the same version of dump.  
Considering the potential problems associated with dump, I still prefer 
it because I have never had problems using it myself.
Another option is to use tar, but I rarely use it to make a compressed 
backup, so someone else might be more helpful with syntax.  (man tar 
would also be helpful)

HTH,
Steve Fettig

Richard Beyer wrote:

>We're currently doing a back up of a FreeBSD 4.9 (2) server by plugging a
>USB external drive in and then doing
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>cp /dev/ad0 /dev/da0
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>This takes about 30 hours, (USB 1).
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>Is this the best way to do it, or can someone suggest a better way.  We'd
>rather not have the server offline while we do it.
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>Cheers,
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>Richard
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