Hi, I'd like to come up with a disaster recovery scheme for our FreeBSD based webmail server, ideally using a USB drive for backup purposes. I'd like to be able to go from bare metal back to an exact replica of our currently installed server. Many of the discussions I've seen on this issue suggest just backing up user data and system configuration info, and when it comes to to recover, re-installing FreeBSD with the current source, and then restoring data. However, I've recently run into no end of problems with bugs introduced by a new versions of ports, so I really want to be able to back to the exact install I had before.
You could do a minimal install of freebsd on the usb drive.
Then take a dump of the filesystem and store it on the usb. # mount usb /mnt # dump 0Luaf /mnt/dump /
When you need to recover the system from backup: - Boot the computer from the usb drive - newfs your server root partition - Mount server root partition on /mnt - cd /mnt - restore xvf /dump
