Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
I'm still not sure why I cannot use zfs recv , but I found an alternative method of restoring. Boot from the FreeBSD Live CD Enter the Shell Create your partition structure using gpart Create the pool mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt zpool create -f -o altroot=/mnt zroot nda0p4 zfs set compress=on zroot Restore the backup using gzcat clone.gz | zfs recv -F zroot Set the boot file system using zpool set bootfs=zroot/ROOT/default zroot You can now exit and boot.
Full answer by quickblueblur: https://superuser.stackexchange.com/a/1859503 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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