dump restore pain and suffering

[Kevin Sanders]

I've been dumping and restoring a test system today, and I'm have very
little success.  Basically, I've been installing a base FreeBSD
7-RELEASE/i386 system, doing something like dump -0auL -f
/mnt/test.root.dump, formating the drive and trying to restore -rf
/mnt/test.root.dump.  /mnt is a ufs formated usb drive.  After the
dump, I've even done a restore -rNf /mnt/test.root.dump just to make
sure it doesn't complain out the dump file.

I've read the handbook, found a few articles, googled all the errors.
The header dumpdate thing is harmless, the expected next file is from
it being a live system, but I'm not ending up with a system that is
very usable.  Doing a df, I see that sometimes I end up with a
restored slice that is about the same size as my dump file, sometimes
less than half.  I know I'm not being very specific with what's not
working, but is anyone really using dump/restore and having success
with the restore part?  I'm now full of doubt and worry that my real
systems are not really backed up.

I really wished this worked as easy as falling out of a boat and hitting water.

Kevin