Guides for ZFS Full backup to NFS drive and restore from NFS drive

[Kurt Hackenberg]

On 2019-10-04 17:20, Alejandro Imass wrote:

> Hi there FreeBSD folk!
> 
> Are there any easy to follow guides to completely backup a FreeBSD system
> to an NFS drive and then restore the complete system from the backup in the
> NFS drive?
> 
> I don't have much NFS expertise but it shouldn't be that complicated.
> 
> I found this guide but not exactly what I'm looking for:
> 
> https://www.dan.me.uk/blog/2012/08/05/full-system-backups-for-freebsd-systems-using-zfs/
> 
> Is there a utility or something to make this process less painful?

Do you mean to recreate the file tree on the NFS server, by copying each 
FreeBSD file to an NFS file? That might not work perfectly.

I believe NFS doesn't implement everything the FreeBSD filesystem does. 
It might not include sparse files, special files, extended file metadata 
(access control, "flags")...

If you use ZFS, you probably should use its backup/restore mechanisms, 
as in that article. For good results, it probably does have to be that 
complicated.

If you don't use ZFS, then I suggest that you look at the programs 
"dump" and "restore". They have man pages. The FreeBSD Handbook also has 
some information about backup/restore for non-ZFS:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/backup-basics.html

And a chapter on ZFS:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/zfs.html