How to format an external hard drive and use it to backup my data & system?

GNU2BSD

I've been using GhostBSD for well over a year and am contemplating upgrading to 26.1-R15.0p5 through the Update Station, but I don't have any kind of backups for my data and I am unclear if I have a sufficient backup for my system itself. The tools are different than what I am used to in Linux Mint, so what are my best options?

1- Format hard drive: I attached a spare 300 GB external hard drive formatted as NTFS full of old data via USB that I want to re-format and re-purpose as my backup drive for my GhostBSD desktop. What tool must I use to format it? Must I use the terminal? And what file system? ZFS? I know nothing about ZFS or how to use it other than I am pretty sure that's the file system for my GhostBSD internal system drive.

2- What application can I use to automate data backups of files in my home directory or other directories that I want to back up ? On Linux Mint I use a GUI application called BackinTime that automatically backs up my individual data files every morning while I am sleeping to an hard external drive. Is there something like that for GhostBSD?

3- What about system backups? I used Backup Station to create a new Boot Environment. It's only about 50 MB and took only minutes to do. Is that it? That seemed way too small, too quick, and too easy to be sufficient. Linux Mint uses something called Timeshift to automate system backups say, once per month, and keeps as many or as few recent ones as you think you need and deletes older ones. The files are much bigger. Is Backup Station similar to that? It seems like you have to manually do it in Backup Station unless the Update Station does it for you when you do an upgrade.

4- Is there such a thing as making an image of my GhostBSD system drive and restoring from that if necessary? Once per quarter or so I use Foxclone on a USB stick that I boot into to clone the whole Linux Mint system drive as is, data and system and all as another type of system recovery possibility.

Thanks for any direction.

cmchittom

GNU2BSD I know nothing about ZFS or how to use it other than I am pretty sure that's the file system for my GhostBSD internal system drive.

I started to type out a long response, but honestly, depending on how urgent your need to upgrade is, I think a lot of your questions would be answered by understanding more about ZFS. If you have the time, I would recommend Michael W. Lucas and Allan Jude's book FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS (I have no connection to either other than liking Lucas's books). The man pages for zfs and zpool (and the child manpages like, in particular, zpool-create) are also definitely worth reading.

Briefly, though, on ZFS, snapshots (such as taken through Backup Station) are built into the filesystem. Yes, it's expected that they would be small. Personally I use a combination of snapshots and transferring my data (with a cronjob) to another system (which is also doing ZFS snapshots) via rsync.

I don't know of any GUI applications that would help you here, though that's more because I haven't looked. If you come across one or more, I'd be interested in hearing your experience with them.

Edit: Inadvertently left out Allan Jude's name as coauthor.

GNU2BSD

cmchittom I don't need to upgrade that urgently. But I thought it was prudent to back up my data and system to an external hard drive first before I did. I didn't imagine that step one of such a basic computer function like attaching an external hard drive and formatting it would be so complicated that someone would recommend purchasing and studying a 200+ page book to accomplish it. The external hard drive currently formatted as NTFS actually auto-mounted to /media/da0s1 when I connected it and says filesystem type fusefs. I have no issues reading data off or copying data to the drive as it is. So it works if I just want to manually back up data there, but perhaps that's not ideal to use it that way. From what I could glean from the FreeBSD Handbook about ZFS I'm more terrified to try to format this drive as ZFS and screw up my whole system than I am taking a chance losing my data in the upgrade process.

cmchittom

GNU2BSD From my perspective, the majority of your original questions boil down to "I don't understand how ZFS works" (not a dig, to be clear; nobody can be knowledegable about everything), so I assumed that you wanted to. Hence the book+manpage recommendation. It's not that ZFS is complicated, just that it's different from other filesystems. For example, you don't partition and then format the drive; you create a pool (which can be only a single drive) and then create datasets within the pool; the pool is then imported and exported, not mounted and unmounted (individual datasets may have mountpoints). The concepts are analogous but not the same.

If all you want to do is backup your data, then sure, just copy the files to an external drive with enough space—which realistically can be any filesystem you're comfortable with and the system can read; doesn't have to be ZFS. The data doesn't care where it lives.