Backing up freebsd to 1 file?

[J.D. Bronson]

  be created by the time your system boots on.
>
> Nice answer by Sergio, but I personally would use the j option with tar
> to compress to bzip2;
>
> 3) tar --one-file-system -cvjf /mnt/backup.tbz ./ var usr home
>
> Though I prefer personally to use dump/restore because:
>
> - If you're on UFS, you don't have to single-user the system, just use
> the L option (live filesystem)
> - Restore has an awesome 'interactive' mode
> - See Zwicky [1]
>
> I'll send you my dump scripts if you're interested. It's dead easy to use!
>
> Chris
>
> [1] http://www.coredumps.de/doc/dump/zwicky/testdump.doc.html
>
> .
>

I think Sergio has a nice script. I had been doing something similar but 
I know I recall when untarring  (restoring if you will) it was 
complaining about not being able to do things. It was not sockets and 
similar stuff that gets rebuilt on reboot. I do not have failures handy 
to post (yet).

Truth be told? - I am running FreeBSD hosts within ESXi. I can backup 
the hosts within ESXi but need to take the host offline and its a 
cumbersome ordeal. If I had RAID on ESXi, I wouldn't be so worried per 
se but this is not an option. ESXi is very fussy about what is supported 
and I dont have the $ for SCSI and SCSI Raid.

Basically what I need to do is create a fully restorable backup for 2 
reasons:

1. Easy to create another host on ESXi. I can setup/flavor my fbsd 
install and then once thats done, setup another host.

2. Obvious backup reasons.

...right now, if the SATA drive fails that is hosting the fbsd install I 
am dead in the water. I have 5 hosts on this machine spread across 4 
SATA drives but nothing is mirrored or RAIDed in anyway.

I am at the mercy of these drives w/o any backup-




-- 
J.D. Bronson