another thing is we will probably need to shrink the last slice.
backup hdd is about 1Gb smaller than image (Murphys law dictates it can't be other way round.)

If this is the boot disk, that would make yours a very unusual installation.

yes, its a solaris10 boot disk. I thought all them use ufs, just like windows usually uses ntfs or linux ext3.
So what kind of filesystem should we expect there? all the data is organized in files and directories, afaik.

if we replace the disk with ddbackup when needed, will it work fine? or would (open)boot fail?

Where did you get this disk from? Why can't you ask the Solaris admin the details?
Note that a recent Solaris 10 system can have zfs not only on non-root disks, but also on boot/root disks http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/..._solaris10.jsp

Why do you ask that? I don't see how thats relevant to my questions.
We don't have 'Solaris admin' or support at the moment, sadly. If we did I wouldn't be asking you for help.

all slices in vfstab contain only ufs. except for swap.

You fail to provide concrete data about the disk content.
"vfstab or some Solaris command told us what slices are there." isn't something that will help anyone to help you.
Precisely, that's what I was thinking of when writing not all slices contain ufs. There is no point in backuping the swap.

May be it would be better to restart this from the beginning and have you explaining what problem you are trying to fix in the first place.

well its a long story. simply put, we need backup. hard drives are mechanical components, sooner or later they fail.

how would you backup sparc boot disk? there is no raid installed. besides, second hdd would increase temperature in already hot server. (and we even don't have the damn SPUD).
there is no need for frequent backup. if we could save OS, installed software and its settings, to be restored in case of 'hdd meltdown' that would be great. it doesn't contain much of other data. we could probably enter most of it manually again if needed.

another advantage of having backup is that if we misconfigure something, it should be easy to undo changes.

Please define SPUD.

Can you temporarily plug a second disk (preferably same model and size) to the SPARC server ?

SPUD is a piece of metal that is required to connect 80pin SCSI hard drive. You need to attach the drive to it first. We didn't get any spare when we bought server (grr..).
Without it hard disk cannot be plugged in SPARC. Also we don't have same model and size second disk. It is very complicated to buy even cheapest things here. Ebay has a lot of cheap SCSI drives (same model), but sellers usually require verified paypal address which isn't possible here.

To backup a Solaris UFS disk/partition use ufsdump for a normal partition and fssnap for ones you don't/can't umount first eg root.
See examples here http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E...q1p/index.html

@Jilliage; should this go into Solaris forum?

@chrism01: it probably might now the focus is more on the initial issue (how to properly backup a Solaris system) than the anticipated solution (use a Linux box to do it).