Advice on backup scheme for FreeBSD 5.3 box

[Philip Hallstrom]

> I have been using FreeBSD 5.3 now for a couple months on a P4 box at home and 
> I have been backing up the box nightly by doing a simple .tgz of the /etc, 
> /usr/home and /var directories to a FreeBSD backup server at home (the backup 
> server is a PI box). 
> I’m at the point now, because I’m using that FreeBSD box to host email for 
> myself and some production/development web pages, in case the box fails I 
> want to be able to quickly either rebuild the contents of that box’s hard 
> drive or move the backup server over to replace it.  It took a few weeks to 
> get the P4 box configured the way I want, so I don’t think it’s just a simple 
> matter of popping in the 5.3 install disk and re-installing. 
> So I’m trying to figure out a scheme to avoid more than a couple hours of 
> downtime. 
> I should note that in a few weeks I’ll be replacing the current PI backup 
> server with a PIII box. 
> My home network consists of a linksys router with a couple workstations 
> attached and the above mentioned web and backup servers.  The web and backup 
> servers do not have cd burners, however I could transfer files to one of the 
> workstations to burn backup disks. 
> I would like to know in general some approaches I could take to create either 
> some redundancy in my network at home with the two FreeBSD servers I have 
> (each has different hardware specs) or more effectively back up the FreeBSD 
> box doing the email/web hosting for myself.  I would consider myself a 
> moderately competent amateur system admin.  I don’t work in the IT industry 
> and I have zero knowledge of things like mirroring boxes or using 
> applications like rsync so I’m looking for a guidance on a “simple” solution. 
> Thank you much in advance.

I'm not sure this would work for you, but it works for me for our dev 
servers at work where we need to get a standard box to a specific state 
fairly often.

Install two drives in the server.  Drive A is your primary every day 
drive.  Drive B is big enough to hold both a minimal FreeBSD installation 
*and* the entire contents of Drive A.

Configure the server to allow you to selectively boot either drive, but 
default it to Drive A.

Then, whenever you want to make a backup, boot into Drive B and dump the 
entire contents of Drive A to disk.  Something like:

dump 0af drivea.dump /dev/ad0s1a

For our dev servers we only have one partition, but you'd want to make 
sure you grabbed each partition separately.

Then if you ever want to restore you can boot into Drive B, 
disklabel,newfs Drive A, and use restore to put everything back just the 
way it was.

Probably worth saving a copy of Drive A's disklabel while your doing 
things as well.