How to mount a ZFS pool in FreeBSD for cloning

ubuntu_ulysses

I am in the process of trying to clone a FreeBSD installation onto a new hard drive and need to mount it and then find the mount points in order to proceed with the cloning process. The internal drive that I want to clone to currently has a Windows 10 install and a not very optimised FreeBSD install that I want to clone over. I am happy to use the current UFS partition scheme for the FreeBSD. I will boot from a live FreeBSD USB stick in order to...

Originally asked by Simon Baldwin on Stack Exchange (unix) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

I'm going to assume that your "source" installation is purely on ZFS, and boots directly from the ZFS pool. Since you're cloning between two different filesystem types, you'll likely want to use a tool like rsync to accomplish this. You'll mount the source heirarchy (your ZFS pool) at one mountpoint, and mount the destination heirarchy (one or more UFS filesystems) at a different mountpoint. Finally, you will use rsync to copy the source heirarchy to the destination. Start by reading the zpool man page. zpool has many sub-commands, and each in turn have their own man pages. For starters, note the zpool import command: zpool-import(8) Make disks containing ZFS storage pools available for use...

Full answer by Jim L.: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/701541 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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