Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 2 Mar 2011, Ed Flecko wrote:

> Hi folks,
> I confess I'm more familiar with "Windows" and for years I have
> "Ghosted" PCs as a very fast way to get an entire PC back online in
> the event of a drive failure. I can easily get a PC back online within
> the hour using "ghost" (or some drive imaging software).
>
> Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of "backing
> up" a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the
> drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some
> sort), or from an image, etc.?
>
> What options are available??? Suggestions???

It depends on what filesystem you're using.

For UFS, there are two basic ways.  Copy at the block level or the 
filesystem level.  The first would be dd(1), the second 
dump(8)/restore(8).

There are third-party backup programs like (beta) versions of Clonezilla 
(http://www.clonezilla.org) that understand the filesystems and try to 
copy only used blocks but include MBRs and other information.

For speed of an image restore, dd(8) using a zero-filled image might be 
fastest, and will restore the MBR or GPT and slices and everything.

I have a little bit of information about dd and Clonezilla and a lot 
more about dump in http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html