# Recovering from disaster



## Sparky (Mar 21, 2013)

I installed 9.1 on a 900A eeePC about three months ago. My first experience with FreeBSD. And just recently decided to upgrade. Somewhere along the line, I did `# make deinstall` /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg. Then everything went south. This will give you a flavour http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=213562 

Now I have to back up something and then? Delete something, I guess, then restore the backup. But how do I know what to delete and what to restore? What if I restore something that's already corrupted? 

I'm sure the solution will seem obvious to some, but I am all at sea 

For what it's worth here is the /etc/fstab from the afflicted unit  paste.ubuntu.com/5635570. BTW there's enough space on the SD card to hold the complete backup. But it only has one partition.


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## ta0kira (Mar 23, 2013)

Is it safe to say that you didn't have the machine set up to your liking before it stopped working properly? You might as well dump it all to the SD card and start over, using the config files from the backup as references only (i.e. don't copy/paste the config files to the fresh system.) When I first started using Linux (Slackware) a long time ago I had similar problems (numerous times, that is,) and it got pretty old trying to fix systems that I broke, so I ended up reinstalling more times than I'd like to admit. If you're coming from Ubuntu, which screams at you literally every day about security updates, you'll have to resist the urge to constantly keep your FreeBSD system up-to-date.

Kevin Barry


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