Simple FreeBSD Clone Script

27 January 2011

I wrote these to do a simple system clone using a USB disk. It’s pretty simple using dump and restore, but it does take a bit to get all of the commands and arguments correct.

To use, install the two scripts on a USB drive. Mount the USB drive on the source system, and run “dump_all.sh”. Be sure to change the labels to match your configuration.

To restore, boot a FreeBSD DVD into Fixit mode, mount the USB drive to /mnt, and run restore_all.sh. Again, be sure to change the device labels to match your system. If your disks are different sizes, you’ll also have to modify the bsdlabel file that is generated by dump_all.sh.

Warning: Do not blindly run these scripts. They’re posted here for reference only, and will break your system if you do not understand how to use them.

dump_all.sh:

#Filesystem       Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
#/dev/mfid0s1a    496M    267M    190M    58%    /
#devfs            1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
#/dev/mfid0s1e    9.7G    1.7G    7.2G    19%    /usr
#/dev/mfid0s1d    1.9G    102M    1.7G     6%    /var
#/dev/da0          45G    865M     41G     2%    /mnt

dump -0Lauf - /dev/mfid0s1a | gzip > slash.dump.gz
dump -0Lauf - /dev/mfid0s1d | gzip > slash.var.dump.gz
dump -0Lauf - /dev/mfid0s1e | gzip > slash.usr.dump.gz
bsdlabel mdif0s1 > mfid0s1.bsdlabel

restore_all.sh:

#!/bin/sh
set -o errexit

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mfid0 count=4
fdisk -BI /dev/mfid0
bsdlabel -B -w mfid0s1
bsdlabel -R mfid0s1 mfid0s1.bsdlabel
newfs /dev/mfid0s1a
newfs -U /dev/mfid0s1d
newfs -U /dev/mfid0s1e

if [ ! -d tmp ]
then
    mkdir tmp
fi
TMPDIR=/mnt/tmp
export TMPDIR

if [ ! -d root ]
then
    mkdir root
fi
mount /dev/mfid0s1a root
gzcat slash.dump.gz | (cd root && restore -rf -)

if [ ! -d root/var ]
then
    mkdir root/var
fi
mount /dev/mfid0s1d root/var
gzcat slash.var.dump.gz | (cd root/var && restore -rf -)

if [ ! -d root/usr ]
then
    mkdir root/usr
fi
mount /dev/mfid0s1e root/usr
gzcat slash.usr.dump.gz | (cd root/usr && restore -rf -)