dump restore pain and suffering

[Eric]

Kevin Sanders wrote:
> I've been dumping and restoring a test system today, and I'm have very
> little success.  Basically, I've been installing a base FreeBSD
> 7-RELEASE/i386 system, doing something like dump -0auL -f
> /mnt/test.root.dump, formating the drive and trying to restore -rf
> /mnt/test.root.dump.  /mnt is a ufs formated usb drive.  After the
> dump, I've even done a restore -rNf /mnt/test.root.dump just to make
> sure it doesn't complain out the dump file.
>
> I've read the handbook, found a few articles, googled all the errors.
> The header dumpdate thing is harmless, the expected next file is from
> it being a live system, but I'm not ending up with a system that is
> very usable.  Doing a df, I see that sometimes I end up with a
> restored slice that is about the same size as my dump file, sometimes
> less than half.  I know I'm not being very specific with what's not
> working, but is anyone really using dump/restore and having success
> with the restore part?  I'm now full of doubt and worry that my real
> systems are not really backed up.
>
> I really wished this worked as easy as falling out of a boat and hitting water.
>
> Kevin
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>   
i wrote this up:

http://mikestammer.com/dokuwiki/bsd:dumprestore

after setting up dump/restore for my backup solution. i used it to 
migrate from old hard drives to a RAID1 setup on a 3ware controller and 
everything went well.

what errors are you seeing?

Eric