Acronis True Image 2013 - imaging pfsense 2.1?

miles267 · Jun 23, 2013, 8:20 PM

Has anyone managed to create a backup image of their pfsense hard drive? I appear to be able to backup mine to a .TIB file. However when I attempt to restore the true image backup (TIB) file to a new drive, Acronis greys out the destination drive option. Was hoping to use Acronis since it supports backing up to a Windows network share. Thanks.

stephenw10 · Jun 23, 2013, 10:27 PM

It does not appear to support UFS, used by FreeBSD and hence pfSense.
http://kb.acronis.com/content/34862
It does seem to support a bit-for-bit meathod but that has drawbacks. Perhaps it requires an identical disk to write back to. :-\ I've never used it personally.

Steve

Edit: Here's a good article: http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html
It seems to recommend Clonezilla. I have used that, but not for pfSense, and it was easy to use and did exactly what I needed. As long as you have backed up the config.xml file restoring pfSense is fairly straight forward.

jimp · Jun 28, 2013, 1:56 PM

Backing up the entire drive is a bit extreme. In almost every case, backing up the config is enough.

If you really have to backup to a windows share, this and some cron mojo might get the job done: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,57562.msg307415.html#msg307415

doktornotor · Jun 28, 2013, 2:08 PM

I strongly discourage anyone from using Acronis products for anything. Esp. since it (almost irreversibly) damages the host system.. (This is still valid even with 2013 versions of their products.)