Backup and restore advise sought

[Doug Poland]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 09:57:35AM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > 1.  I'm concerned that the FBSD partition names will change.  i.e., /
> > was ad0s3a may now become ad1s3a and so on.
> 
> Yes, this will happen, but not in the way you've shown: ad0s3a is
> the first partition (a) on the 3rd slice (s3) of the primary master
> disk (ad0).  ad1s3a is on the primary slave drive (ad1).  What you
> should probably see is the current partitions are
> 
>        ad0s1a, ad0s1b, etc.
> 
> And when you swap your FreeBSD and Windows slices, that should
> change to:
> 
>        ad0s2a, ad0s2b, etc.
> 
> I recommend that when you copy the partitions, edit the /etc/fstab
> file and put in the new device names before you copy.  Preferably
> restore the original fstab, and test that you can reboot using the
> new slices before you install WinME over the original FreeBSD slice.
>  
Thank you.  I'm hoping this will be faster than reinstall and I'll
learn something to boot!

> > 4.  Is there a better way?  I remember reading about an OpenBSD
> > "ghost" for Unix.  
> 
> As far as I know, all of the Unix "ghost" programs are essentially
> scripts build around dump and restore.
> 
While eagerly awaiting your response, I did some more googling on unix
"ghost" programs.  NetBSD has a floppy-based program called g4u that
appears to use dd then sends compressed image to network ftp server.
I might use that as a back-up in case anything goes wrong with plan A.
Thanks again for you help.

-- 
Regards,
Doug