Dump/Restore for system migration

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 10:50:28AM -0800, Chris Maness wrote:
> I have used dump/restore for system migration a couple of time and noticed
> it is pretty good, but every once in a while it will miss or corrupt a
> file.  Is there a better way to do this?  I would imagine having a system
> mounted r/o would help, but this is not always possible.

Nevertheless this is the best way to go. Especially if you use UFS with
journaled soft-updates (which is the default now, IIRC) where you cannot use
snapshots.

If I want to dump the filesystems on a machine, I use init(8) to go so
runlevel 1 (single user mode), where the root fs is mounted r/o and the rest
is unmounted. I mount /tmp, and dump the rest of the filesystems to files in
/tmp. That procedure has never failed for me.

> Is there a way to
> check the deltas between systems manually after migration to see if any
> files need to be merged or copied.  I would imagine the files that are in
> jeopardy are ones that are being written to while the dump is taking
> place.  I had a file the keeps track of rss feeds end up missing on the
> target system.

For copying files between running systems, I tend to use rsync(1).
If anything was being modified during the first run, a second run will usually
fix it.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://rsmith.home.xs4all.nl/
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