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Today, I leveled up my computer fairy skills.
Over the last few days, I used FreeBSD dump(8) & restore(8) to back up a live system onto a USB spinning platter (once fully & twice differentially), restore it onto a new system for testing, and completed basic self-training today by plucking a single file from the backup I had originally intended to scp over to a third system.
It was quicker than rsync & more reliable than tar (which doesn't like files changing content from underneath it).
Today, I leveled up my computer fairy skills.
New challenge already. I just found out that restore(8) works with a ZFS filesystem & UFS dump image, but dump(8) doesn't like ZFS filesystems at all.
Today, I leveled up my computer fairy skills.
And _without_ a pressing or terrifying need to make a backup before anything crashed for the final time.