Well, I was finally able to use rsync to recover from a simulated disaster. Hopefully this information might be useful to some other newbie in the future, and below is a brief outline of what I did.
1. Used the below commands to make backup copies of certain directories onto a USB thumb drive. (I know that it was rinky, but it was the only thing I had available at the time.)
Code:
mkdir -p /media/da0p1/backup
# Prepare a list of installed packages with below command:
pkg prime-list > /media/da0p1/backup/package_list_c.txt
# CREATE DIRECTORIES ON USB TO HOLD BACKUP COPIES OF SYSTEM DIRECTORIES
mkdir -p /media/da0p1/backup/boot
mkdir -p /media/da0p1/backup/usr/local
mkdir -p /media/da0p1/backup/home
mkdir -p /media/da0p1/backup/etc
# COPY SYSTEM DIRECTORIES
rsync -avhpo --progress /boot/loader.conf /media/da0p1/backup/boot
rsync -avhpo --progress /usr/local/etc /media/da0p1/backup/usr/local
rsync -avhpo --progress /home /media/da0p1/backup/
rsync -avhpo --progress /etc /media/da0p1/backup/
2. Physically removed the hard drive containing from my functional installation of FreeBSD, and replaced it with a hard drive containing no operating system.
3. Installed FreeBSD onto the new hard drive I had earlier installed into my machine. Do not create any accounts during the installation process. (I think that creating an account may have caused me trouble on one of my earlier attempts at this.)
4. Reboot the new installation of FreeBSD, login as root, mount / and also mount the USB thumb drive. Bootstrap the package utility and do an pkg update. After that, copy your list of installed packages into your root directory. In my case the file was named package_list_c.txt. Next, use the below command to install the packages listed in the file, packages_list_c.txt
Code:
pkg install $(cat /package_list_c.txt)
5. Not sure if it was necessary, but at this point I rebooted and logged in again as root, and then I remounted both the / directory and my USB thumb drive. Next I issued the below set of commands to restore the directories I had earlier backed up to thumb drive.
Code:
RESTORE SYSTEM DIRECTORIES
rsync -avhpo --progress /media/da0p1/backup/boot/loader.conf /boot
rsync -avhpo --progress /media/da0p1/backup/usr/local/etc /usr/local
rsync -avhpo --progress /media/da0p1/backup/home /
rsync -avhpo --progress /media/da0p1/backup/etc /
6. After the above process finished, I umounted the thumb drive, and then I rebooted the system once again. After the reboot my login screen was back, my user name was listed in the login menu, and the original password from the previous installation of FreeBSD worked, and also my printer, sound, and webcam are all working on my new restored installation of FreeBSD.
I realize that copying critical system files to a USB thumb drive is not a good practice, but for me this was more of a proof of concept thing. Also, in one of my earlier attempts I tried to copy the entire backup directory from my USB thumb drive into the root directory of my hard drive. In this case rsync seemed to restore all of the directories into their proper locations, but I could never login properly under these circumstances. I think that the ownership of folders contained within the backup directory got screwed up when I copied them to the root directory, and maybe that is why I was having so many problems on my earlier attempts at doing this. I may be wrong, but it seems that the best thing to do is to restore the above directories from exactly the same location you backed them up to, otherwise something happens to ownership and permissions, and then the restored installation doesn't seem to function very well. But the method I outlined above in this post worked for me, and now I feel like the caveman who invented fire.
