What is the best way to image copy a FreeBSD system?
Jerry McAllister
jerrymc at msu.edu
Tue Feb 15 15:07:22 UTC 2011
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 01:53:44AM -0500, Xn Nooby wrote:
> On Linux I use clonezilla, which understands the EXT3 filesystem, and
> it can skip unused space (I'm using about 3GB out of 1TB).
>
> On FreeBSD, I have to fill the 1TB drive with zero-filled files, then
> delete them, on each partiton, since CloneZilla uses DD+gzip on the
> entire drive.
>
> I like to make image copies of new systems, so I can revert back to my
> starting point in case I break it, but CloneZilla is taking 9 hours to
> image the drive. I can re-install a lot faster than that.
My suggestion would be to do the slicing/partitioning on the copy
and then use dump/restore on each partition from the new drive to
the copy drive.
A dd image is not really all that good a way to do it.
It just produces a sector by sector copy which is not efficient.
The dump/restore produces what you want which is an efficient runable system
on the copy disk.
Once you get the dump/restore finished, you could use rsync periodically
to keep it up to date. Actually you could use rsync to do all the
copying on to the prepartitioned copy drive, but I would prefer dump/restore.
> I normally store my image copies on a Samba share on another system,
> they are stored as files. I am not copying to another raw drive.
In that case, use dump(8) to create those files and store them
where-ever you wish.
>
> Is there an image-copy backup program that understands the UFS
> file-system? Or perhaps there is a better solution on FreeBSD?
As mentioned above, dump(8)/restore(8) is made for that.
////jerry
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