Clone a FBSD system with something in the likes of ghost

[Alejandro Imass]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 1:10 AM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2016, Robert Huff wrote:
>
>> On 9/28/2016 10:43 PM, Alejandro Imass wrote:
>>
>>> I have a beautiful running server (dozens of jails and intricate
>>> configuration) on a single small and aging hard drive. I bought 2 new hard
>>> drives and want to migrate to a ZFS mirror.
>>>
>>> Pardon my ignorance but would there be a way to just copy my system from
>>> the old drive to the new ZFS array?
>>>
>>> I was thinking of something like this: 1) install the two new drives in the
>>> server and boot with old drive via an USB enclosure. 2) Create a booteable
>>> ZFS array and somehow copy an identical image of my current system onto the
>>> array.
>>>
>>> Am I dreaming or are there actual ways of doing this? I really don't want
>>> to re-install and configure everything. Just want to move an identical copy
>>> of my system to the new hard drives on a ZFS mirror.
>>
>>
>>         The canonical - and correct - method involves dump piped to restore; there may be an example in the Handbook.
>
>
> I have not tried it, but I think restore(8) should work when writing to a ZFS system.
>
> So dump(8) on the original UFS piped to restore(8) on ZFS, presumably in a dataset or multiple datasets.
>
> http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html
>
> After it is on ZFS, dump(8) cannot be used, but zfs send and zfs recv are similar.  Or rsync, or tar, or clonehd, or other things.  The options with them are the trick.  It takes a lot to get rsync to make a serious copy of a non-trivial filesystem with links and flags.

Thanks for your suggestions!
I will look into dump and restore.

Thanks again!

Alejandro Imass