Folks....I have just finished installing what I would like to call my base FreeBSD installation. From here I will be experimenting with and learning about FreeBSD. Thus, I would like to make a backup of this install for easy/quick recovery if one of my experiments goes wrong. On a Windows box I would have used GHOST.
I have Googled and read but questions remain and practical advice seems to have eluded me.
Here is where I am. I have created, formated and mounted an external USB hard disk.
Here is the
where the last entry is my external drive which has one folder bu022211
Some authors suggest backing up everything while others seem to propose deleting the ports directory as it can be easily restored with
From a "How to" on this forum,
and
Does this "How to" imply that I only need to back up the ad0s1d folder (/var) to later do a full restore?
Assuming I would use the latter command above, it this the correct format to create a compressed image on my external hard disk?
Then for restoring, after any necessary disk maintenance tasks
and a reboot to be back in operation?
Thanks in advance.....GK
I have Googled and read but questions remain and practical advice seems to have eluded me.
Here is where I am. I have created, formated and mounted an external USB hard disk.
Here is the
df -h
output:
Code:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a 496M 169M 287M 37% /
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
/dev/ad0s1e 496M 50K 456M 0% /tmp
/dev/ad0s1f 176G 1.3G 161G 1% /usr
/dev/ad0s1d 2.9G 92M 2.6G 3% /var
/dev/ufs/BUDiskFreeBSD 289G 8.0K 271G 0% /mnt
where the last entry is my external drive which has one folder bu022211
Some authors suggest backing up everything while others seem to propose deleting the ports directory as it can be easily restored with
portsnap
. And, there seem to be many other variants.From a "How to" on this forum,
dump -0Lauf /path/to/backups/ad0s1d.dump /dev/ad0s1d
and
dump -0Lauf - /dev/ad0s1d | bzip2 > /path/to/backups/ad0s1d.dump.bz2
.Does this "How to" imply that I only need to back up the ad0s1d folder (/var) to later do a full restore?
Assuming I would use the latter command above, it this the correct format to create a compressed image on my external hard disk?
dump -0Lauf - /dev/ad0s1d | bzip2 > /mnt/bu022211/ad0s1d.dump.bz2
Then for restoring, after any necessary disk maintenance tasks
bzcat /mnt/bu022211/ad0s1d.dump.bz2 | restore -rf -
and a reboot to be back in operation?
Thanks in advance.....GK