A reliable backup strategy for a newbie

[Cedric62]

which is synched every ten minutes, and you figure out:"F#c4! I accidently deleted that directory, half an hour ago

Oh no! That is exactly the type of mistake I enjoy making on a regular basis. Well, maybe not on a regular basis, but I could see this disaster happening to me. For the moment, I will have to stick to methods I can understand.

 

[Cedric62]

I use midnight commander

Does Midnight Commander have the ability to make a disk image of my entire / partition, and then store it on an external drive?

 

[MG]

Does Midnight Commander have the ability to make a disk image of my entire / partition, and then store it on an external drive?

I do that with the dd command. 1 disadvantage may be that it breaks on any failure.
dd if=<input device/partition> of=<output file> bs=100M
Make sure to read "man dd" and test a backup recovery procedure.
You can also recover specific content inside a backup file by loading it with mdconfig and mounting it somewhere to copy files from it.

 

[Cedric62]

I'm just wondering if the below set of commands will help me to repair my master boot record, in case something were to happen to it?

mkdir -p /media/da0p1/backup/boot/efi/efi/freebsd
rsync -avh --progress /boot/efi/efi/freebsd/loader.efi /media/da0p1/backup/boot/efi/efi/freebsd

And then to restore:

rsync -avh --progress /media/da0p1/backup/boot/efi/efi/freebsd/loader.efi /boot/efi/efi/freebsd

Last year I gave up on FreeBSD 14.1 because I accidentally destroyed my mbr when I tried to make FreeBSD dual boot with Ubuntu. I want to come up with a plan in case I make that mistake again. Below is what I have stored at

 

[Cedric62]

I do that with the dd command

I'm vaguely familiar with using dd to play around with DVD images, so I think that I can make that work.