Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?

[Lowell Gilbert]

Ed Flecko <edflecko at gmail.com> writes:

> I confess I'm more familiar with "Windows" and for years I have
> "Ghosted" PCs as a very fast way to get an entire PC back online in
> the event of a drive failure. I can easily get a PC back online within
> the hour using "ghost" (or some drive imaging software).
>
> Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of "backing
> up" a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the
> drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some
> sort), or from an image, etc.?
>
> What options are available??? Suggestions???

Lots of options.  

 - The standard backup technique is dump(8)/restore(8).  It takes more
   than an hour for me to get back up from a dead disk, but I think it
   would be much faster if I didn't encrypt my backups.  [Also, size and
   speed of disks and backup media will matter, of course.]

 - There are "ghost" style programs that understand BSD filesystems.  I
   don't really see any advantage to these.

 - mirroring techniques.  This would mean that when a disk dies, you
   already have a copy of it ready to step in.  Some forms of RAID will
   do this for you, there's a GEOM class that will mirror any filesystem
   on it, or you could run a separate program (e.g., rsync to copy
   changed files over on a schedule).

Other than, possibly, the "ghost" options, you'll find more information
on all of these concepts and terms in the FreeBSD Handbook.