Making a bootable backup (hard)disk... how?

[Robert Huff]

Ronald F. Guilmette writes:

>  I got a lot of disks here, so that part is not a problem.  I just
>  need to make sure that I'm gonna do this the Right Way[tm].
>  (I've already been making my own ham-fisted disk-to-disk backups
>  in the past, but I'm sure that the way I have been doing that is
>  sub-optimal, so I'm here seeking knowledge of how to do this the
>  Right Way.)
>  
>  The bottom line is this... I know how to use cpio, and would like
>  to use it to create a complete and _bootable_ backup of my main
>  system disk.  (My main system disk has only one BIOS partition,
>  and that is sub-divided into the usual set of FreeBSD partitions,
>  you know, /, /dev, /tmp, /usr, /var, /usr/compat/linux/proc, and
>  /var/named/dev.)

	As far as I know, the only way guaranteed to preserve metadata
is dump/restore.  See previous (not necessarily recent) discussion
(on this list, and possibly in the Handbook) for more information.



					Robert Huff