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Date:      Thu, 22 Feb 2001 20:22:23 -0700
From:      Bradford Castalia <Castalia@azstarnet.com>
To:        "Corey G." <ctgaff@telocity.com>
Cc:        Alexandr Kovalenko <neve_ripe@yahoo.com>, lists <lists@lists.grot.org>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: installing onto a new drive from a running system
Message-ID:  <3A95D76F.ACD80A09@azstarnet.com>
References:  <20010222152655.A70899@mighty.grot.org> <11423074949.20010223014023@yahoo.com> <20010222191020.A51735@telocity.com>

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"Mirroring" (in the sense of making a duplicate, not in the RAID sense)
should be a trivial operation. I, too, use a plug-in drive drawer which
contains a disk that matches the internal system disk. I duplicated the
system disk to the removable disk using dd on a quiescent system:

dd if=/dev/rad0 of=/dev/rad4

This copied _everything_ - boot block, disk label, filesystem info,
user files - in one go (i.e. a byte-for-byte duplicate of the entire
contents of the device). It did take awhile (30GB ATA 7200 RPM), and
requires that the disks be physically alike, but it's the simplest
way I can imagine to make a truly duplicate a disk.

After the dd I can mount each partition independently (e.g. to /mnt)
and find everything exactly as it appears from the original. The
duplicate disk is a convenient backup, easily ports to other systems
in its plugable drawer, can substitute for the system disk after a
disaster, and is suitable as the system disk in a clone system.

This is not a substitute for a well managed backup plan. But with
disks being inexpensive commodity parts, it was an easy way to
duplicate my system disk after I confirmed that I had a good
fresh installation and get the peace of mind that my foundation
is secure.

-- 

Bradford Castalia                       Castalia@azstarnet.com
Systems Analyst                         http://azstarnet.com/~castalia
idaeim                                  520-624-6629

"Build an image in your mind, fit yourself into it."
    The Log of Cyradis, Seeress of Kell.


"Corey G." wrote:
> 
> I successfully did a dupe of my running FreeBSD 4.2 system using the
> following method just a few weeks ago. My goal was to keep it as simple
> as possible.  I use pull out drives which makes this method even easier
> for myself.
> 
> 1. installed the second drive as a slave
> 2. created partitions and labeled partitions using sysinstall from the
>    running system
> 3. mounted each partition from the slave drive one at a time to /mnt
> 4. used "rsync -avp /source/ /mnt" as my copy method for each FS
> 
> When I was done I simply switched my master and slave drive and
> rebooted.  Everything worked without a single modification.
> 
> Rsync was my choice, maybe not the fastest in this situation but it
> worked.
> 
> Thanks,
> Corey
>

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