FreeBSD USB disks - booting and backups

[Wojciech Puchar]

>> 
>> i'm doing this with my notebook.
>
> Great.  What kind of drive?  And have you actually
> had to do a restore?
>
some used 80GB 3.5" drive (Seagate) + noname USB-IDE jack (true noname, 
nothing written on it). the latter costed 6$ new, including disk power 
supply.

works very well.


i don't make any partitions on it, just


dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1m count=1

to clear things up

newfs -m 0 -O1 -i 16384 -b 4096 -f 512 -U /dev/da0

options for max of space, not performance, as i backup 120GB notebook 
drive.


then to make a copy i do:

mount -o noatime /dev/da0 /root/copy
cd /root/copy
rsync -avrlHpogDtS --delete --force --exclude-from=/root/copy.exclude / .
umount /root/copy




my copy.exclude file looks like that (change to your needs:

/OLD
/root/copy/*
/dev/*
/usr/ports
/proc/*
swap
/tmp/*
/var/tmp/*
/usr/compat/linux/proc/*
/usr/obj





the /OLD file are on copy drive, not master, just to be able to have many 
generations done by cp -lpR


after copying first time you have to

bsdlabel -B da0

WARNING: when booting from copy, get to single user and fix fstab to have 
/dev/da0 as root.



other remarks: keep the copy plugged only when copying, then store in safe 
place :)