Copying bootable USB thumb drive to smaller thumb drive

[StriatedFoot]

Presently, I have an 8GB thumb drive that I boot FreeBSD 8.2 from. I have a couple of 2GB thumb drives which I'd rather use for this purpose (allowing me to keep one as a backup). Is it possible to copy the contents of the 8GB thumb drive to the two 2GB thumb drives? Since I'm going from larger to smaller, it's not clear to me that I could simply dd them.

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a    644M    273M    320M    46%    /
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/da0s1d    1.5G     16M    1.4G     1%    /var
/dev/da0s1f    3.6G    438M    2.9G    13%    /usr
/dev/md0        62M     12K     57M     0%    /tmp
/dev/md1       3.6M     52K    3.3M     2%    /var/run
/dev/md2        62M    3.4M     53M     6%    /var/log

Obviously I'm using well under 1GB of this drive.

Thanks guys!

 

[wblock@]

Install an MBR on the 2G drive and a single partition for /. dump from the 8G drive's UFS filesystems, restoring to the appropriate places (/, /var, and /usr) on the 2G drive.

References:
Disk Setup On FreeBSD
Backup Options For FreeBSD

 

[StriatedFoot]

Sorry, I'm a bit of a novice. To install the MBR, do I just copy it over from the 8G with dd? I guess I need to make sure the new one is the same block size? And to copy the filesystem from the 8G, do I simply cp -a?

 

[wblock@]

The first article shows an example. The second has examples of how to use dump(8) and restore(8) to copy filesystems.

 

[jb_fvwm2]

Just a note of caution: I've had consistent failure copying to/from USB thumbdrives without a
speed-limiting factor (either a single-file copy with #sleep 1 a loop, or

 rsync ... --bwlimit=(250 OR 500 OR 1000)

; each of which has produced comparatively excellent results in what otherwise hoses the filesystem (*unless* the machine is a very slow, say, pentium 2 266-speed...) (Please see other threads with the keywords).

 

[StriatedFoot]

Thanks for the help guys. Another question: when I label it, should I enable softupdates for all partitions? Remember, it's a USB stick that will be booted from, and then /var/run and /var/log and /tmp end up memory disks. Does that alter my decision here?

 

[wblock@]

There will only be one partition. If you split a disk that small into partitions, the free space is also split up and much less useful.

Yes, use softupdates, but avoid softupdates journalling unless it is a recent 9-STABLE.