Clone a FBSD system with something in the likes of ghost

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 2 Oct 2016, lokadamus at gmx.de wrote:

> At this point there are some similar products like norton ghost. One is
> http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html#g4u

These are mostly going to do the same thing as dd(1) when they don't 
understand the filesystem.  Clonezilla does understand UFS, and I have 
used it once or twice to clone a FreeBSD disk.  I still prefer 
dump/restore.

In the old MBR days, there was no serious problem with partition tables, 
because there was only one partition table at the start of the disk. 
GPT puts one at the start of the disk and the end of the disk, so binary 
copying a smaller disk to a larger one puts the secondary partition 
table somewhere before the end of the larger disk.  It's not really 
possible to copy a larger disk to a smaller one with dd(1), so that 
problem does not come up.

I recommend backing up first, then setting up the target disk partitions 
and bootcode: 
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html

Then use dump/restore to copy from the original:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html

> The problem is always, that is can't boot, when it come from a hdd to a ssd.

I have not experienced this, but my first guesses would be that bootcode 
was not installed, or that it is one of the earlier FreeBSD versions 
that did not boot at all if the secondary GPT table was not correct.