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Old 14th August 2008
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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As I mentioned above, and as you should have learned during installation .... the "c" partition is the entire hard drive.

As I mentioned above, dd(1) copies every sector, regardless what is in it. So if you are using dd to back up a 250GB hard drive, the output of the dd command will be 250GB.

As mentioned several times to you, the standard practice is to use tools which back up individual filesystems. Several were already mentioned: dump/restore, tar, cpio, and pax. Specifically for OpenBSD, dump/restore is most often recommended -- tar is handy for small hierarchies but is usually unable to backup complex directory structures due to filename size limitations.

For disaster recovery, the ramdisk kernel (bsd.rd) booted from installation media is typically used -- all of the built-in tools mentioned are included with that kernel. One would recreate and restore all filesystems -- if your system uses daily(8), you will find your disklabels in /var/backups, so you might restore /var first to acquire them. Note that restore(8) requires some space in /tmp, so if using bsd.rd, you will need to mount /tmp before running restore.

Installing boot blocks is done with installboot(8).
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