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looking for drive imaging software for BSD

A

aux

Senior member
Looking for drive imaging software for BSD that ideally does the following:
Boots from CD/DVD, then allows me to create an image of a drive or a partition and save the image to another local drive or CD/DVD. For restoring -- no need for bootable image; it is ok if it can boot from CD/DVD and then use the image to restore the drive/partition.

The program should be able to create an image of the drive/partition, rather than just clone a drive/partition. This requirement is due to my laziness 🙂



Similar programs that don't do exactly what I need:

Yes, I am aware of dd 🙂

Image for Linux doesn't seem to support ffs.

Partition Image doesn't seem to support ffs.

g4u doesn't seem to be able to save image to a local drive, only to remote ftp server. For local partitions it looks like it can only clone local partitions.



Any ideas about such a program?
 
I don't think any imagine tools do FFS or UFS directly. Your best bet would probably be tar and a LiveCD.
 
Who doesn't have a system that can run ftpd? g4u is the best I've seen.

What's the difference between a clone and an image?
 
What's the difference between a clone and an image?
Click to expand...

I think he means that he wants something that understands the filesystem so that his image is the size of the data not the entire partition.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
I don't think any imagine tools do FFS or UFS directly. Your best bet would probably be tar and a LiveCD.
Click to expand...

I was hoping for a complete GUI solution, but I can live with using tar every once in a while. I guess, it's time to re-RTFM.


Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Who doesn't have a system that can run ftpd? g4u is the best I've seen.
Click to expand...

Don't have a spare machine now.


Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
What's the difference between a clone and an image?
Click to expand...


The way I understand it, image is a file, whereas clone is an exact copy of one partition into another partition. I will need to keep say weekly snapshots of the same partition, so I prefer to use images. If I am to clone partitions then I need to partition the target drive into several partitions and clone the source into different partition every week. Using images, I can keep many of them on the target drive without having to partition it.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
What's the difference between a clone and an image?
Click to expand...

I think he means that he wants something that understands the filesystem so that his image is the size of the data not the entire partition.
Click to expand...

Not saving the free space would be an advantage, but I prefer image (i.e. some kind of file), because I can store several of them on the same partition of the target drive.


I will try some BSD flavor (or whatever it is called in the BSD world), not sure which one. The idea is to keep several snapshots of the system. If I screw up something I will be able to recover easily to a previous "good state" without having to reinstall the system from scratch or spending a lot of time fixing it. Probably that is not a very good idea, because by trying to fix it I will learn it better, but I am lazy and don't have enough time to spend on this.
 
Not saving the free space would be an advantage, but I prefer image (i.e. some kind of file), because I can store several of them on the same partition of the target drive.
Click to expand...

Alright, I didn't realize that by clone you meant partition->partition.

I will try some BSD flavor (or whatever it is called in the BSD world), not sure which one. The idea is to keep several snapshots of the system. If I screw up something I will be able to recover easily to a previous "good state" without having to reinstall the system from scratch or spending a lot of time fixing it. Probably that is not a very good idea, because by trying to fix it I will learn it better, but I am lazy and don't have enough time to spend on this.
Click to expand...

You'll probably want to use the same BSD that the system is running, just to be sure everything is copied properly.

I know Linux lets you create snapshots of LVM volumes at runtime, those would make your image creation pretty convenient but I don't know if any of the BSDs have something similar.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
Not saving the free space would be an advantage, but I prefer image (i.e. some kind of file), because I can store several of them on the same partition of the target drive.
Click to expand...

Alright, I didn't realize that by clone you meant partition->partition.
Click to expand...


I prefer partition -> some kind of image file, but g4u supports this only to ftp server. On local disks it supports only partition -> partition.
 
Boot into single user mode, mount the removable media (hard drive or whatever) RW. dd the drive into a fle on the removable media. gzip the resulting file.

I did this for my Z, although I stored the file on another system using ssh so it took a while (wireless + SSH + slow drive on the Z + slow proc on the Z = slow).

Which BSD are you using? The device to backup might be slightly different with a different BSD, I've only looked into OpenBSD's information.

Doing this across BSDs shouldn't be an issue, dd shouldn't have to know anything about the filesystem to do it. I probably wouldn't risk it though, just in case I['m wrong. Each BSD has a slightly different FFS.
 
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