System-wide backup / restore

[Zare]

Ok, i have a following issue; my "system" HDD (320 GB) has three BIOS partitions, each ~ 100 GB. I wanted to mess with OSX on my PC a bit, so i installed it into first partition. However, i also installed freeBSD onto third. Second is basically empty, left it like that so i can install something else if i wanted to.

Basically now i want freeBSD to occupy half of hard disk. Problem is, slice is located on the second third of the geometry. In order to enlarge it, i must move it.

I've never done such thing, besides GEOM keeps bugging me about wrong geometry. Probably some BIOS translation issue.

So i basically thought this could be problem-proof; back up complete filesystem with tar (minus /dev/ /proc/ and alike) to my NAS, wipe up whole HDD, fresh install of freeBSD to slice that's on first half of HDD, boot into it, transfer the tar archive back, unpack, edit fstab, reboot.

I'm looking for confirmation that this will work seamlessly

 

[gentoobob]

next time you should probably plan out your partitioning schema a little better before hand. Save yourself the trouble. I hope it all works out for you though.

 

[foo_daemon]

Idea sounds cool, but have you thought about just newfs'ing the 2nd slice and mounting it as a subdirectory somewhere, e.g. /home/zare/downloads ? It's much easier and safer. You could even pick a file system that both MacOS X and Freebsd recognize so that you can get those files anytime..

 

[Zare]

next time you should probably plan out your partitioning schema a little better before hand. Save yourself the trouble. I hope it all works out for you though.

I do, when i deploy it on servers. However, this is my main home lab computer where i do all sorts of stuff, so having a permanent partition layout without buying 10 HDDs is out of the question

If one day VirtualBox OSE gets true hardware bypass mechanism, it's gonna be permanent freeBSD

Idea sounds cool, but have you thought about just newfs'ing the 2nd slice and mounting it as a subdirectory somewhere, e.g. /home/zare/downloads ? It's much easier and safer. You could even pick a file system that both MacOS X and Freebsd recognize so that you can get those files anytime..

Yeah, well i have 1TB ext2 HDD for that usage, r/w inside BSD, Linux, Windows, nice for that kind of scenario. I'm really concerned about those geometry-based GEOM warnings, and besides, having freeBSD on the physical beginning of the HDD grants growing.

Actually, i do same kind of trick all the time. We are using IPCOP for firewalls commercially, and when a customer decides on options, configuration is done, and i just tar the whole filesystem minus special dirs. If a problem occurs, i just d/l the backup to the fw box, and untar it to root. Reboot and presto.

I even transferred complete Debian 5 systems from HP ProLiant ML350/G5 to small VIA EPIA EK boxes Just needed to regenerate udev bindings afterwards and that was it.