backup existing sata drive

[Damian Wiest]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 03:08:53PM -0700, Dino Vliet wrote:
> Good evening peeps,
> I have this 80gb sata seagate harddisk in my freebsd
> amd64 system. This harddisk is partioned so I can dual
> boot with Ubuntu. So I have data on my freebsd
> partition as well as on my ubuntu partition.
> 
> As I'm getting paranoia, I would like to know how to
> get by this situation, now that I've ordered a new
> sata seagate 80gb harddrive.
> 
> I waant to use this extra drive as a backup solution.
> What options do I have?

Do you want to do real backups, or just do point in time
recovery?

> a) Can I just plug the new hard drive in and write a
> script that dumps the entire /usr/ directory onto the
> new hard drive? But what about my ubuntu partition
> then?

If you go this route, you'll probably want to use dump(8)
for your filesystems.  Just name the output file according
to the filesystem and date when the dump was performed.

> b) Should I use raid-1, disk mirroring for this
> situation, knowing I will "loose" a whole 80gb disk?
> Will it work for the entire disk? What about the fact
> that I'm NOT starting with two empty disks?
>
> Hope anyone can help me out.
> I've never been there, so these will be my first
> steps.
> 
> Thanks in advanced

I've only used it for a few months, but I'm a big fan of the
GEOM(4) framework.  With gmirror(8), you can specify specific
disk slices to mirror so you don't have to do the entire drive.
It should take you less than five minutes to setup once you've
read the docs.

-Damian