Administrative file locations

[Monkey_Demon]

I'm developing a shell script to backup all my jails. Hopefully it will store the backup both on my NAS and off-site in the Cloud. The script creates a log and stores the initial backup on the local system, so there are 3 local files: the script, the log, and the backup.

On earlier *nix systems, I'd create an administrative user, store the script in /usr/local and probably store the log somewhere like ~/jailadmin/jail_backup.log and the backup itself in ~/jailadmin/backups/ in the administrative user's account.

But things are different on FreeNAS, with its pools and datasets, and with its dedicated boot drive. There's either no clear root directory (/) or what would be the root directory for the system files is on the boot drive and effectively quarantined from the rest of the system.

So how do you organize administrative files -- like custom shell scripts, log files, and backup copies -- on FreeNAS, TrueNAS, or FreeBSD systems?

 

[winnielinnie]

I have a dataset named "home" where I have user home directories and custom scripts. Custom scripts are under a "bin" directory.

• /mnt/mainpool/home/ <--- dataset named "home"
• /mnt/mainpool/home/bin/ <--- custom scripts saved here
• /mnt/mainpool/home/doug/
• /mnt/mainpool/home/fred/
• /mnt/mainpool/home/sally/

Bold is a dataset in the ZFS pool. The rest are simply directories within the dataset.

This way everything is saved between reboots. From what I understand, TrueNAS boots with a clean slate, and then loads all your settings from a database. This same file can be "exported" (as a .tar file) when you want to save a copy of your current TrueNAS configuration.