Backup complete gmirror/gstripe/gjournal drives, how-to?

[Doug Poland]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 10:29:36AM +0100, Ivan Voras wrote:
> Doug Poland wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've got a 7.1-PRERELEASE i386 box with 4 SATA drives configured in
> > a RAID-10 using gmirror, gstripe, and gjournal.  Normally, I use
> > dump and rsync for periodic backups on this machine, but I suspect
> > that the gmirror/gstripe/gjournal information is not being backed
> > up.
> > 
> > If my assumption is correct, how can I perform a "one-time" backup
> > such that I could do a bare-metal restore?  The essence of the
> > question being I want to preserve not only the data, but also the
> > gmirror/gstripe/gjournal meta-data as well.
> > 
> > The only thought that comes to mind is to boot with a 7.1 live
> > filesystem CD-ROM and "dd" each drive, piping the results to my
> > backup machine.  e.g.,
> > 
> > host#  dd if=/dev/ad4  bs=2m | gzip | nc backuphost 12345
> > host#  dd if=/dev/ad6  bs=2m | gzip | nc backuphost 12346
> > host#  dd if=/dev/ad10 bs=2m | gzip | nc backuphost 12347
> > host#  dd if=/dev/ad12 bs=2m | gzip | nc backuphost 12348
> > 
> > Any thoughts, suggestions, caveats?
> 
> I hope you understand the problems with this kind of backup
> procedures.
> 
Actually, I don't, that's why I'm posting :)  My intent is to have a
backup that can be used to completely restore the machine, including all
the GEOM metadata.  My suggestion of using dd is the only thing I could
come up with so far.  So I'm asking, is there a better way?

> Assuming that ad4,6,10,12 are the drives from which you created your
> RAID-10, everything is "backed up", including GEOM metadata.
> 
Yes, those are the names of my drives.  Thank you for your time,

-- 
Regards,
Doug