OSOL - Imaging Boot Disk / Backup Thoughts and Issues

[Dropbear]

I've been setting up a server with Solaris 11 Express with the following conf;

1x750GB Boot Disk

3x1.5TB Pool Disks


All set up nicely. Only thing is, when I installed OSOL, I stupidly(?) gave it all of the 750GB boot disk to play with..

I now find myself wanting to image copy the boot disk to protect against loss, and so I can restore to this point in time in a hurry and I realise thats going to be a 750GB image (less with compression).. ouch

So now I'm considering doing a reinstall - partitioning the boot drive into a 20GB boot + The rest.. That way I can install onto the 20GB partition and image that when I need to. Treat the rest of the disk as throw away space.

So.. question is .. Am I thinking straight? is the best way to 'backup' a solaris install to do an image copy of the boot drive?

also question - I have a zfs pool on the 3 pool drives. After I do a reinstall (if I go down that route), will it automatically find the pool for me? Do I need to do anything 'zfs export?' before I shutdown the system to make it easier to find?

How do other people cope with protecting their boot areas? use mirroring and snapshots?