After much hard work, the PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 1.3 BETA2 is now available for download. This version adds support for installing in languages other than English, and addresses many numerous bugs found in BETA1. 1.3 BETA2 can be downloaded from the beta download page. You will also need to download 1.3 CD2 if you wish to install in languages other than English. Please report any and all unreported bugs on the BugsDB or the forums.
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Member since:2005-09-10
Wow, you had way more experience with unix than I do ... all the more surprising your initial stance about /home placement 
But I see your point now, and the benefits it has to you as a proud owner of a tape drive
Me, I used linux from RH 7.2 to Mandrake 9.1, then switched to FreeBSD 5.1 (when it came out) - and stayed with it since than. Installed PC-BSD out of curiousity, but since then, I moved back to FreeBSD STABLE, tweaked the kernel, etc., so the only thing reminding me of PC-BSD is that I still can install PBIs apparently (I have exactly one PBI installed - openoffice) - and automounting of media when you insert them (usb, cd/dvd) works.
I had a maxtor drive once from a branch that tended to fail a few weeks after the warranty period. So before it came to that, I bought a new drive, and used the method you described (exactly the same command with dump & restore) to move (and adjust the size) of my existing partitions. Use that drive for backups since then.
Member since:2006-10-08
"But I see your point now, and the benefits it has to you as a proud owner of a tape drive "
Tape drives are for lazy people. :-)
"I had a maxtor drive once from a branch that tended to fail a few weeks after the warranty period."
The usual time of accident. Sometimes I think some disks are built in order to do so... on the contrairy, there's many hardware that works for years - it's older, slower, but sometimes more reliable.
Edited 2006-11-28 22:36
Member since:
2006-10-08
"Haha, right. I never saw a tape drive in my life (I mean real, I saw them in movies from the 80's
)"
I only bothered to learn dump & restore after doing a complete reinstall when it turned out my /usr wouldn't suffice (my very first install of freebsd, 5.l at that time, had ~3 Gb for usr!) 
Wish I knew that earlier - it's a fine repartitioning tool if you have a spare disk 
"
I'm not talking about tape drives with big spools (as you might know them from the IBM MTUs), I mean the compact tape systems actually in use at larger scale data processing facilities.
For the PC platform, there have been floppy tape drives and parallel tape drives some years ago. The Sun SparcStations I once had as well as the SGI machines I use now had / have tape drives connected externally via SCSI. Still a fine thing if you have data amounts bigger than a DVD can hold. Backup via DVD reminds me to the Amiga 500: "Please insert disk 12 of 24." :-) So the bigger capacities of the tapes are very good to handle. And you don't need ISO-9660 filesystems, you can save all file attributes and restore them. Interoperability is great if you do something like tar cf /dev/sa0 bla.mpg on one system and mplayer /dev/sa0 on the other one. :-)
"That's a good trick
Yes, it's very simple AND secure. Usually, I use /stand/sysinstall to do partitioning and setting the boot loader (instead of fdisk, disklabel and newfs). Let's assume you have your source system on ad0 and the designated target on ad1. Then you'd do something like this in single user mode (after umount and fsck):
# mount /dev/ad1s1a /mnt
# cd /mnt
# dump -0 -f - /dev/ad0s1a | restore -r -f -
# mount /dev/ad1s1e /mnt/var
# cd /mnt/var
# dump -0 -f - /dev/ad0s1e | restore -r -f -
... similar way with /usr (f) and /home (g) ...
Note: All partitions on ad0 are umounted except / which is mounted -r to have mount, dump and restore available from /sbin.
(BTW: I use FreeBSD regularly as a main OS since 4.0 along with Solaris and IRIX. So I can tell from the useful similarities of these systems.)
To come back on topic: Yes, you can do this with PC-BSD as well. :-)