From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Mar 4 20:32:54 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ptavv.es.net (ptavv.es.net [198.128.4.29]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E8CE637B6F7 for ; Sat, 4 Mar 2000 20:32:50 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from oberman@ptavv.es.net) Received: from ptavv.es.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ptavv.es.net (8.9.3/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA31562 for ; Sat, 4 Mar 2000 20:32:48 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <200003050432.UAA31562@ptavv.es.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Copying partitions Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2000 20:32:48 -0800 From: "Kevin Oberman" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG With the low price of disk drives and the high price of both tape drives and media, I have decided that a disk is the most cost effective backup medium I can buy. I have a FreeBSD STABLE system which now has two 13.6 GB disks and I want to make the partitions on one copies of those on the other. Except for the root partition, Vinum looks like a reasonable option, but there have been recent reports on the stable mailing list that the Vinum in 3.4 has a major bug that might make it unreliable. Is Vinum a safe way to do this? I intend for the second disk to act as my backup and reliability is critical. While reliability is critical, currency is less so and I can just manually copy the data, it that is what it takes. In any case, I will need to do something like this for the root partition. What tool is reasonable for this? dd, cpio, dump piped into restore, something else? I'd like to preserve all file attributes and soft links, if that is possible, and that eliminates many ways of doing it. Any comments or suggestion are appreciated. Thanks, R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message