backing up OS partitions

[cbrace]

Hi all,

I am very part-time FreeBSD admin, so your patience is appreciated.

I have FreeBSD 7 installed on an old P4 as ADSL gateway/web/mailserver/WAP. I would like to updgrade it to the current stable, and move it to a larger HD.

I make nightly backups of /etc, /var, and /home but I don't have a back up of the base OS. If I back up the following files and directories to a remote disk, can I do this with rsync? If I copy the files back again with rsync to a different drive, can I simply boot from that drive?

-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  6188 Nov 16  2007 COPYRIGHT
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel  1024 Nov 28  2007 bin
drwxr-xr-x   9 root  wheel   512 Mar  3  2008 boot
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel     1 Jan 22  2008 boot.conf
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   512 Nov 28  2007 cdrom
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    10 Nov 28  2007 compat -> usr/compat
dr-xr-xr-x   4 root  wheel   512 Feb 19 20:38 dev
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   512 Nov 28  2007 dist
-rw-------   1 root  wheel  4096 Nov  4 10:30 entropy
drwxr-xr-x  20 root  wheel  2560 Dec  6 15:51 etc
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     8 Nov 28  2007 home -> usr/home
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel  1536 Dec  7  2007 lib
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   512 Nov 28  2007 libexec
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  wheel   512 Nov 10 18:15 media
drwxr-xr-x  14 root  wheel   512 Aug 19  2008 mnt
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   512 Nov 16  2007 proc
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel  2560 Nov 28  2007 rescue
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  wheel   512 Feb 20 03:18 root
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel  2560 Feb 20 12:29 sbin
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root  wheel    11 Nov 28  2007 sys -> usr/src/sys
drwxrwxrwt   9 root  wheel  1536 Feb 20 13:30 tmp
drwxr-xr-x  17 root  wheel   512 Sep 26  2008 usr
drwxr-xr-x  26 root  wheel   512 Feb 19 20:38 var

I am thinking of (also) backing up the os with tarsnap to have a copy offsite.

Also, how does one install the bootloader or whatever it is called on the new target disk?

Thanks.