Carrying the ports' options to a fresh installation

C

choosy23

Hi,

I am not sure if this is a clean solution, or if there is a better way to do it, that is why I ask.

I had FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE on my laptop, on which I have configured and installed the needed ports. I have upgraded with portmaster to 9.1-RELEASE.

Now I want to do a complete reinstall of 9.1-RELEASE (for switching to zfs) but I want to preserve the ports' options that I have configured recently. My idea is to backup /var/db/ports and then copy it over to the newly installed system.

From my understanding, when I will compile the ports on the new system, the options will be taken from /var/db/ports so I won't have to configure them again.

Is this a good approach? Is there anything else I need to do?

Thank you,
Stefan
 
Another way of doing that upgrade would be backing up everything with dump(8), redoing the drive into ZFS, and then restoring from the dump file. Although I have not tested restoring onto ZFS, I suspect it would work. Backup Options For FreeBSD has usage information.

If not, there's net/rsync to copy from an old filesystem onto the new disk. Be careful about the options, it needs several to copy FreeBSD filesystems correctly. I use -axHAXS --delete --fileflags --force-change. Some of those probably won't work on ZFS.
 
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