# Boot from sent ZFS datasets?



## forquare (Oct 24, 2018)

Hi all,

I do most of my work on a VirtualBox VM on my work laptop. The VM runs FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE. 

I routinely ZFS snapshot my environment and send those snapshots to a secondary desktop, also running FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE. 
On the desktop they live under:
zroot/usr/vm_backup

Today I’ve come into work, and I’ve lost access to my laptop (BitLocker needs recovering or something) and IT isn’t in yet to provide support. 
“No problem”, I thought, my environment is also on my secindary desktop!

However, aside from copying files around, I don’t know how I can actually use this environment…
It’s not a Boot Environment (And not sure how/if I could make it one?). 

What I’d like to do is to temporarily switch the system to boot the environment under zroot/usr/vm_backup/zroot so I can start working again  

If this isn’t possible because of how I’ve configured my setup, but could work with changes, then that would be useful to know because I can make the changes once I get back into my laptop. 

Many thanks,
Ben


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