Clone a FBSD system to a smaller disk.

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 04 Oct 2016 09:52:11 -0400, Ernie Luzar wrote:
> I have a 10.3 box using a MBR 1.5 TB hard drive. This Box acts as the 
> LANs front door firewall to the public network. The 1.5 TB disk is being 
> waisted in this situation. What would you recommend as the quickest 
> method to clone the running system from the 1.5TB disk to a 40MB disk?

Preparing the target disk with MBR or GPT or Dedicated (use GPT
except you have a good reason not to), then use dump + restore.
You can find more information here:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html#_the_new_standard_gpt

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html#_copying_filesystems

The advantage of dump | restore is that only blocks in use will
be copied, and it works on file system level (instead of disk
block level like dd). Initializing the target disk prior to
starting the copy operation will make sure the partition data
is being written to the correct places.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...