Anything specific to keep in mind restoring from rsync ? (Re: Any reason to prefer 11.1 over 10.3 ?)

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017, Manish Jain wrote:

>
>
> On 08/18/17 13:19, Matt Smith wrote:
>> On Aug 18 07:35, Manish Jain wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am going to have to install FreeBSD again on a box on which 10.3R
>>> works well. Is there any reason I should prefer 11.1R ?
>>>
>>> Thanks for any tips.
>>> Manish Jain
>>
>> The main reason for 11.1 would be the expected end of life date when
>> 10.3 will no longer be supported. As you can see from
>> https://www.freebsd.org/security/security.html#sup that is April 30,
>> 2018 whereas 11.1 will be 3 months after the release of 11.2.
>>
>> Obviously you can upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4, or from 10.3 to 11.2, and
>> from 11.1 to 11.2 quite easily, but it's easier to start with 11 than it
>> is to start with 10 and do a major version upgrade.
>>
>> Unless there are any strange issues particular to your hardware 10 and
>> 11 should work identically really.
>>
>
> Hi Matt/Others,
>
> I decided that a fresh install would be too much effort considering the
> ease of rsync to back up existing data.
>
> The primary reason I am in the current muddle is that the / partition
> has to be made bigger ( 30G -> 40G ). What I have done is rsynced (with
> some exclusions) / to /mnt/backup
>
> I have actually never restored data with rsync earlier. Precisely what
> should I be doing to return copy out /mnt/backup over /  ?
>
> This is what I actually intend : if anyone spots something stupid,
> please chime in now : - )
>
> 1) Install 10.3 again on the larger root partition
>
> 2) Reboot with the optical media and drop into a fixit shell
>
> 3) Mount the intended slash at /tmp and the partition holding the
> rsynced backup at /mnt
>
> 4) rsync from /mnt to /tmp
>
> Is the above a decent approach ?
> Thanks for any insight/suggestions.

Don't use rsync for this.  If you do, be sure to add the half-dozen 
options that preserve hard links and keep the /rescue directory from 
growing unexpectedly.  The preferred methods are dump/restore for UFS 
(http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html) and
zfs send | zfs recv for ZFS.