# Ghosting or Imaging a system



## rbizzell33 (Jun 16, 2010)

What software besides Acronis will let you image a FreeBsd System. I tried some software from this website http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/. It worked on a desktop system but when I tried the software on my FreeBsd system that is running on an HP Proliant ML 110 it just hung up. Is there any other software that will let you image an entire BSd system


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## wblock@ (Jun 16, 2010)

What are you trying to do?  Clone one system to others?  Backup?  Switch to a huge new disk?

dump/restore: not particularly fast, but only backs up used sectors.  You can restore to a differently-sized partition, and even retrieve individual files out of the dumpfile.  Probably the best-supported way to go.

Clonezilla and later versions (maybe beta) of System Rescue CD support UFS , and also only back up used sectors.  I haven't tested these with UFS much.  Restores to the same or larger partitions.

And then there's dd, which copies every block of the hard drive, used or not, and will create a huge image that will restore to an identically-sized partition.  Don't get source and destination confused, and the destination disk should be at least as big as the source.


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## phoenix (Jun 16, 2010)

Rsync works wonderfully for this.  We use it to backup all our servers every night.  Recovery process is:

boot from LiveCD
partition drives
create filesystems
mount filesystems
rsync from backups server
reboot

If your backups/images server runs ZFS, then you can enable compression (and if running OpenSolaris, dedupe) to minimise disk usage.


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## rbizzell33 (Jun 17, 2010)

I want to be able to boot the system up in a disaster recovery situation and pull an image off of a backup server. Restore the whole system


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## ccc (Jul 31, 2010)

rbizzell33 said:
			
		

> I want to be able to boot the system up in a disaster recovery situation and pull an image off of a backup server. Restore the whole system



Try imaging and cloning tool *g4l*.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/


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