Disk Cloning

[krad]

2009/9/29 Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de>

> On Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:07:31 +0100, krad <kraduk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > If your going to do all the partitoning manually its not to much more
> work
> > to newfs them as well.
>
> Partitioning can be automated, as well as newfs, which does
> take only seconds on a TB-sized disk. If you want to avoid
> this, doing 1:1 copies with dd is always possible and will
> keep content identically; remember to copy the MBR separately
> with bs=512 and count=1 from the /dev/ad{source} device.
>
> If cloning is just a "do once" action, even partitioning
> the target disk manually is a matter of seconds. If you're
> going to to it many times, scripting should give a good
> solution to automate it.
>
>
>
> > You can then use rsync which is fast.
>
> If partitions do already exist, rsync is an excellent tool,
> too, I agree. Another tool that comes into mind is cpdup
> which works fine with locally available and NFS mounted
> drives.
>
>
>
> --
> Polytropon
> Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
>


On a side note. Anyone building new systems manually from the shell I would
recommend using GPT labels if you can. Apart from not having the 8 fs limit
(128 iirc) gpart is a dam sight nicer to use than bsdlabel, and scripting it
is a doddle. Especially the gpart from 8.0 as its a bit less clunky than the
one in 7.x at the moment