Our next approach is to buy a USB drive (£65 from Amazon, 500GB
) and hopefully Trueimage will be able to restore from that.......
But then so will the FreeBSD utility called DD, which we know works and can restore from anything one is able to mount. That is maybe a better approach. Switch the OS to single user mode to run the backup, and to restore you boot using a FreeBSD boot CD and run DD on that.
That sidesteps the ethernet adaptor issues, and the USB drive can be kept in a firesafe