FreeBSD9 - Fresh install (2)

[Mike Clarke]

On Sunday 14 October 2012 19:05:32 Jos Chrispijn wrote:

> The slice one and two idea is perhaps Windows related, but I thought if
> I want to update my FreeBSD9 t0, let's say 10 or 11, I only have to
> clean slice one and put BSD on that again (having the backup slice
> untouched).

My approach would be to go for 3 slices. Slice 1 would be a suitable size to 
hold the OS and swap, I have quite a lot of ports installed on my desktop PC 
so would go for about 20 to 30 GB. This could be less for a server but with 
1TB you can afford to be generous. This can then be partitioned to suit with 
whatever combinations of /, /usr, /usr/local, /var. /tmp and swap suits your 
fancy.

The second slice would be the same size as the first and be left empty for now 
as a spare.

The third slice, the rest of the disk, would be for all of your data and could 
be partitioned (or not) to suit your needs for /home and any other local data 
requirements. If there's to be any large mysql databases then I'd put them 
here with symlinks from /var where mysql normally expects to find them.

When you come to upgrade to the next FreeBSD release just install it into the 
spare second slice and boot from that instead of the first. If you experience 
any serious problems with the upgrade then nothing has been lost and you can 
just revert to booting of the first slice until things are sorted out.

The above is all assuming you're using UFS. If you're going to use ZFS then 
there are other possibilities like using sysutils/beadm from ports 
<http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=175325> to manage multiple boot 
environments in a single partition.

-- 
Mike Clarke