A Shout-out to the Developers

[Norm Powroz]

I have just recovered from what could have been a real disaster, and I wanted to acknowledge the strength of TrueNAS and the developers behind it. I've been a developer for fifty years, and I really appreciate quality work.

My near disaster unfolded this way -- I've been using FreeNAS and TrueNAS since about version 8 or 9 of FreeNAS. I switched to TrueNAS along the way, and upgraded it a couple of times, recently running version 12. I saw the availability of 13 a few days ago, so told the system to download it and upgrade. As part of the process, I was asked to create a backup of my configuration, and elected to do that, saving the TAR file to my workstation.

At some point during the upgrade, my TrueNAS system died a horrible death. The system would no longer boot, not even partway. I suspect the motherboard, but it could as easily have been the CPU (an AMD chip), or the memory. I know it wasn't the power supply.

So. now I had to build a whole new box -- new motherboard, new CPU (an Intel this time), new memory, and a new boot drive, this time using an NVME stick since the new motherboard came equipped for that. Previously my boot drive was an mSATA board connected to an external SATA port. My biggest concern was whether I was about to lose the contents of my drive array, or was going to have to manually re-do the whole configuration. The box had four 8 TB drives internally, plus two external drives connected by USB, so there was quite a lot at stake.

With fingers crossed, I installed TrueNAS 13 onto the NVME stick, booted it and configured the network settings. All seemed to be good, so I shut it down, re-installed the drive array, then restarted the box and logged into the web interface. Told it to read in the backup file and seconds later absolutely all of my configuration had been restored -- Windows shares, access settings, parameters -- the works. It's as if the box had never shut down, but now it's completely different hardware, save for the storage drives. In a word, I was impressed!

Kudos to everyone involved in building this sweet piece of code, and to the strength of the backup and recovery mechanism. Keep up the good work!

Cheers
Norm

 

[morganL]

I have just recovered from what could have been a real disaster, and I wanted to acknowledge the strength of TrueNAS and the developers behind it. I've been a developer for fifty years, and I really appreciate quality work.

My near disaster unfolded this way -- I've been using FreeNAS and TrueNAS since about version 8 or 9 of FreeNAS. I switched to TrueNAS along the way, and upgraded it a couple of times, recently running version 12. I saw the availability of 13 a few days ago, so told the system to download it and upgrade. As part of the process, I was asked to create a backup of my configuration, and elected to do that, saving the TAR file to my workstation.

At some point during the upgrade, my TrueNAS system died a horrible death. The system would no longer boot, not even partway. I suspect the motherboard, but it could as easily have been the CPU (an AMD chip), or the memory. I know it wasn't the power supply.

So. now I had to build a whole new box -- new motherboard, new CPU (an Intel this time), new memory, and a new boot drive, this time using an NVME stick since the new motherboard came equipped for that. Previously my boot drive was an mSATA board connected to an external SATA port. My biggest concern was whether I was about to lose the contents of my drive array, or was going to have to manually re-do the whole configuration. The box had four 8 TB drives internally, plus two external drives connected by USB, so there was quite a lot at stake.

With fingers crossed, I installed TrueNAS 13 onto the NVME stick, booted it and configured the network settings. All seemed to be good, so I shut it down, re-installed the drive array, then restarted the box and logged into the web interface. Told it to read in the backup file and seconds later absolutely all of my configuration had been restored -- Windows shares, access settings, parameters -- the works. It's as if the box had never shut down, but now it's completely different hardware, save for the storage drives. In a word, I was impressed!

Kudos to everyone involved in building this sweet piece of code, and to the strength of the backup and recovery mechanism. Keep up the good work!

Cheers
Norm

Appreciate the feedback and glad it worked well for you.

Your experience is our primary goal.. . it does take us a little longer to develop and test, but we think its very worthwhile. Some data is priceless.

The next level of protection is off-site .. that's why we are investing in making ix-storj work well (and be affordable).