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Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:46:16 -0800
From: "Peter A. Giessel" <pgiessel@mac.com>
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To: Dino Vliet <dino_vliet@yahoo.com>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: backup existing sata drive
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On 2006/09/29 14:08, Dino Vliet seems to have typed:
> I waant to use this extra drive as a backup solution.
> What options do I have?


Dump is an excellent solution if you can mount all partitions
(see
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/backup-basics.html
for details on using dump)

DD would be another option that would copy the entire hard drive sector
by sector, regardless of the partitions.  If you are interested in
basically a "mirror" sort of situation without running RAID, dd is what
you are looking for.

dd doesn't care what the partitions are, indeed you could even backup
Microsoft partitions with it.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=dd&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.1-RELEASE&format=html

basically:
dd if=/dev/sourcedisk of=/dev/backupdisk bs=1m