dump and restore

[Malcolm Kay]

On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 06:51 am, Peter Boosten wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> My harddisk was failing and I wanted the data copied to
> another disk, but since my original wouldn't boot, I installed
> a minimal FreeBSD on the new disk, mounted the old partitions
> under /mnt and copied from the original to the new partitions
> by using:
>
> dump 0af - /dev/ad2s1[adef] | restore xf -
>
> (the partitions adef where done one by one)
>
> The /usr/ partition was 74Gb, and it took (according to dump
> 52631 seconds (~ 14.5 hours) to copy. Both disks are IDE, in
> the same machine on different IDE controllers.
>
The time for dump/restore normally depends more on the occupancy 
of the partition than its actual size. This is one reason why we 
avoid using dd for this purpose as we must then copy the entire
74Gb rather than just that used.

> Is it normal for a backup/restore to take this long? Or could
> this be due to my failing disk?
>
> Peter

Malcolm