Dump/Restore for system migration

[Chris Maness]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 11:03 AM, Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> 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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Awesome, Roland.  That is perfect.  That would definitely get all of the
missed files.  However, I have never been able to setup a direct login with
root.  I think I would need that to use rsync as root.

Thanks,
Chris