Backing up a FreeBSD system

[Steven J Corso]

I would like to utilize dump to back up my filesystems on a FreeBSD
machine.  I happen to be utilizing FreeBSD current at this time.

I would like to do this from single user state on the system.

I have made this work, and the restore as well to another disk drive,
which is great.

However, I would like to have the system check and see if I want this to
happen at a specific time, and do the backup, and then return to
multi-user state.

I think I did this a long time ago under BSD/OS.

I did it something like this:

1.  Set a cron job to check for the existance of a file (like
want.backup).

2.  If no want.backup, do nothing

3.  If want.backup, then "init 1", backups, reboot.

There are a couple of things I can not figure out:

1.  How do you get a FreeBSD system into sigle user state and start a
shell without the prompt from init?

2.  When the system goes into single user state how do you get it to
execute a script?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Steve