Ghost for FreeBSD

[Warren Block]

On Sat, 30 Aug 2003, Stefan Malte Schumacher wrote:

> Well, just like the subject says I am for a program or a backup approach
> simillar to the one I am currently using. I boot with a Dos-Bootdisk and
> use Ghost to backup my Linux-Partitions to a FAT-Partition and then
> distribute the images around different computers on the network. I would
> like to be able to something like this with FreeBSD. I have had a look at
> Ghost 4 Unix but this is mainly oriented towards deploying images via the
> network while I just want to store the files locally. The advantage of Ghost
> and Ghost4Unix is that is is very easy to restore the system even if it so
> messed up that it wont boot. How can I do this ?

See http://www.partimage.org.  There are a few bootable Linux CDs that
include partimage; I've used the ~40M Gentoo one very successfully on
FAT32 partitions.

PartImage UFS support is still marked as beta; I have not tested it on
FreeBSD partitions.

There is no FreeBSD port of PartImage yet.  It does compile, and almost
works from the command line.  However, it seems to depend on some
Linuxisms, and I've had no time to try farther.

Restoring after a crash will depend on where the image file is saved.
If it's smaller than 700M or so, it will fit on a CD.  Boot the Gentoo
system into ram (gentoo cdcache) and then you should be able to load and
mount the CD with the image file.  For larger images, it should be
possible to use DVD, or maybe tape.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA