# Remote live system to local hard drive



## murias (Nov 4, 2010)

I have a FreeBSD 7.1 box at a colo running as my server.  What I would like to do is to copy the entire filesystem to a local hard drive on my home machine.  Making the local drive bootable into 7.1.

Is this at all possible to do using just the FreeBSD install disk and my empty hard drive?  Ultimately I was hoping to use the install disk to partition and label the new hard drive and then use the Fixit shell to transfer the filesystem via rsync, dd, or some other such utility.

Might there a potential better way of doing this?  

Not a newbie to FreeBSD, but first time attempting anything of this nature.

Appreciate any and all input.  
Thanx.
Murias


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## phoenix (Nov 4, 2010)

Boot using the Frenzy LiveCD.  Configure networking.  Partition/format the drives.  Mount the filesystems.   Then just rsync from the remote system to the local drive.  And, reboot.

That's the restore process we use for our Linux and FreeBSD systems, where the backups server is just a bunch of rsync'd directories from remote systems.

One thing to make sure of: 

always use *--hard-links* and *--numeric-ids* on the rsync command-line

Failure to use --hard-links will result in a *huge* waste of space on the local system, as FreeBSD uses a *lot* of hardlinks.  For example, the entire /rescue folder is 1 file, hardlinked multiple times.  

Failure to use --numeric-ids can cause havoc with ownership and permissions on the local drive.


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## wblock@ (Nov 4, 2010)

murias said:
			
		

> I have a FreeBSD 7.1 box at a colo running as my server.  What I would like to do is to copy the entire filesystem to a local hard drive on my home machine.  Making the local drive bootable into 7.1.
> 
> Is this at all possible to do using just the FreeBSD install disk and my empty hard drive?  Ultimately I was hoping to use the install disk to partition and label the new hard drive and then use the Fixit shell to transfer the filesystem via rsync, dd, or some other such utility.



The following links are from http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html.

I kind of like to put a minimal install on the target system, allowing testing to make sure it got an MBR and boots okay.  Then just restore a backup over the top of it.

(I've got notes on setting up a new system from scratch without sysinstall(8) using both MBR and GPT, but haven't written them into an article yet.)



> Might there a potential better way of doing this?



Yes, dump via ssh.  That goes a lot faster if you use chflags(1) to set the nodump flag on directories you don't need to back up, like /usr/ports, /usr/src, and /usr/obj.


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## murias (Nov 22, 2010)

That Frenzy cd did the trick.  Only wish it could read firewire ports.  Also appreciate the extra tips for rsync'ing.


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