Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 19:32:09 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@grumpy.dyndns.org> To: "Rino Mardo" <rmardo@crosswinds.net> Cc: "Kathy Quinlan" <katinka@magestower.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: upgrading to larger HDD Message-ID: <200105010032.f410W9308263@grumpy.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: Message from "Rino Mardo" <rmardo@crosswinds.net> of "Mon, 30 Apr 2001 19:56:32 %2B0400." <006801c0d18e$f5ebb3c0$26162ad5@pikachu>
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"Rino Mardo" writes: > 4. do a (cd /; tar cf - / | cd /mnt; tar xvf -) note: i don't have > access to a *nix box right now so you might want to check how to > preserve the files The problem with the above is that it will try to recurse thru /mnt. Also the following would be better syntax, note the paren was moved: cd /; tar -cf - --exclude /mnt / | ( cd /mnt; tar xvf -) However tar doesn't do FreeBSD /dev right. One way around that is to cd /mnt/dev; sh MAKEDEV all But better yet one can replace "tar c" with dump and "tar x" with restore. Other arguments differ. But dump/restore know how to preserve and reproduce everything UFS. You'll have to invoke once per fs. Having done all of the above at one time or another or several times let me suggest they are all good learning experiences. But the best thing to do is to break down and do a clean install. You are moving to a drive large enough to easily hold a .tar.gz of your entire old system. So once the old drive is gone you'll still have its files to fall back on for reference. Probably no problem at all bulk moving user home directories via tar. But for the stuff in /etc, /var, and /usr/local/ you have this opportunity to keep careful notes as to what is important. On such systems I keep a file named such as /root/important listing each important file, one per line, full path. Such as /etc/master.passwd and /etc/rc.conf. /var/ is important so I simply list one entry for the entire directory. As I do for /home/. Notice the slash ending /home/ as its usually a symbolic link and without the slash you backup the link, but with the slash you backup what the link points to. With such a list of important files one can do a "delta backup" using tar -cvf /dev/tape --files-from /root/important Then in the event of a catastrophic failure you have copies of all the important stuff which is not part of the standard install. If you install from the latest and greatest then the backup files will not perfectly lay back on top of the system but will be much easier to manually merge than to reproduce from memory. If you reinstall the exact same release as you originally installed from then you could simply blast these backup files on top of the installed config files and be back where you were before. On FreeBSD, I'd use the directory listing in /var/pkg/ as a working list and install the packages new rather than backup/restore. I used to use the same technique for installing the same basic stuff on multiple SGI Irix systems. They often loaded Irix differently based on their hardware. So this let me use the SGI CD's to get the thing running and quickly bring it into conformity with our standards. Even so I had a written 10 page checklist so my boss could do it in a pinch. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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