I dream of restore

In order to accomplish more in a shorter period of time, I decided to try to image the working Sguil drive for one location so as to reuse the good stuff elsewhere. Paragon's Drive Backup ESE didn't like the fact that the drive to be copied was BSD. Kept complaining my Linux drive was "invalid". Ghosting using Norton Ghost was similarly unsuccessful.

Bummed, but still determined to make this work, I Googled for a solution.

Dump and restore? Native to FreeBSD, which means no complaints about "invalid Linux" partitions. But will it work for what I need?

I decided to test it out. And I'm still testing. But something interesting happened last night.

Some background: I'm still working full-time and going to school full-time, on top of the wedding planning and mommy duties. When I sleep, it's a welcome change. I'm also sick with the stuff that's going around and have just acquired a prescription for amoxycillin.

This morning I woke up at a quarter to five with "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles in the echoes of my mind's ears. (Wait, do minds have ears? You know what I mean!) Fading from just behind my eyes:

"restore -r -f - /dev/ad0s1a".

The last time I dreamt in code, it was Assembly back when I was learning mainframe programming. This is a good thing, since it was right around then everything went "click". Another year with FreeBSD and I might be able to put it down on my resume.