Re: Simple BSD Backup System

John Richards <john.richards280@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am not griping. I think that FreeBSD is great, and I would like to
have the confidence to transfer to it. But until I have a satisfactory
and reliable backup system, that would be rather unwise, don't you
think? - not that I think FreeBSD is unstable, but to guard against my
own clumsy attempts to experiment.

I am not looking for a Partimage CLONE, but for something comparably
easy to use, and which also produces a file of a reasonable size. I am
sorry if you think that is unreasonable.

As somebody already said, (dump | restore) coupled with gzip will do
exactly the same thing as partimage, that is read the filesystem and backup
only the used blocks and compress them. The only problem is to learn how to
use it. The basic usage to dump and restore through a pipe is
dump -0f - / | restore -rf -
Then you can stack all sorts of commands such as gzip, rsh or ssh in the pipe
to put the backup in compressed form on another machine, etc, that is
recover all the functionalities of partimage.
For example
dump -0f - | gzip | ssh myself@some_machine 'cat > backup'
will put the compressed backup of root partition on some_machine.
ssh myself@some_machine cat backup|gunzip|restore -rf -
will restore it.

Don't forget that you can run all those commands from a good live
freebsd cdrom like frenzy(*), and you have all what you need and more.

The only gotcha: dump works only on filesystems, so you have to specify the
filesystem as in fstab here /. And second dump can work for several levels
dumps, here you need the full dump, that is zero level.

(*)http://frenzy.org.ua/eng/
Try it, you will love it. Another lovable tool is qemu to practice
all those commands on virtual machines without risk.


--

Michel TALON
.

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