best approach to clone a disk?

[Joe Auty]

Thanks Steve,

These were the exact instructions I started with, only on a different  
page....

The problem with these for me is that dump caused a core dump. I've  
been trying to run dump while booted up from a Freesbie CD, but I was  
getting "unknown file system" errors I didn't know how to deal with.

I'm going to try g4u next, but I'm surprised that what I originally  
thought would be a simple task has turned out to be such an amazing  
chore =(


On Feb 14, 2006, at 10:12 PM, Steve Quinn wrote:

> --- Joe Auty <joe at netmusician.org> wrote:
>
>> What is your strategy for dealing with disks of different sizes, like
>> mine are?
>>
>>
>
> Hi Joe
>
> Sorry dude, this will be a long read
>
> I use Ghost for Windows cloning mostly since it understands Fat and  
> NTFS filesystems and I don't
> have to worry about empty blocks
>
> I used to use Partimage quite a bit but that was during my Linux  
> days  :-)
>
> Now that I've discovered FreeBSD, I prefer to use Ghost for Unix  
> (G4U) for cloning my FreeBSD
> boxen
>
> If you are cloning to an identical drive, G4U rocks. As a client/ 
> server based solution or even
> locally it is really slick.
>
> If cloning to a bigger disk, G4U will work but will waste space on  
> your new disk requiring growfs
> or other methods to use it up.  (I have not dared to used growfs yet)
>
> I often want to clone a FreeBSD installation to a new larger drive  
> and don't want to fuss with
> post cloning thingys
>
> Here's an excellent dump/restore prodecure that I've successfully  
> used on many production clones
>
> http://community.unixcities.com/node/5
>
> It may seem like a lot but trust me, it's really worth learning  
> this process
>
> It's surprisingly fast as dump/restore understands the native  
> filesystems it copies and thus
> ignores empty blocks
>
> I've got it down to a single simple script if you would like a copy
>
> Good luck and take care
>
> Steve
>
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