Any alternative to destroying the pool

[NASbox]

I have a box with 4 x 6TB drives in RAIDZ2 that I want to expand to 8 x 6TB drives in RAIDZ2.
AFAIK I have to destroy/recreate the pool and reload everything from backup.

Is there any alternative that I might have missed?

I'm looking at a day or so downtime, and a bit of risk, so I'd love to avoid it if possible.
Thanks in advance for any advice/suggestions.

 

[danb35]

Is there any alternative that I might have missed?

Unfortunately not. In a couple of years, that answer might change, but as of today there isn't.

 

[Chris Moore]

I'm looking at a day or so downtime, and a bit of risk, so I'd love to avoid it if possible.
Thanks in advance for any advice/suggestions.

Sorry. I went through this myself a few years back when I switched from RAID-z1 to RAID-z2 and bumped the number of drives from 5 to 6.

The speed at which you can bring your data back into the pool is highly dependent on how you backed up your data. What method have you used?

 

[adrianwi]

Whilst it would be somewhat of a waste of drives, you could just create an identical vdev (RAIDZ2 4x6TB drives) and add that to the pool. You'd still have the same 2 disk redundancy, but would be using 4 disk rather than 2 to achieve it.

I went through something similar and having another box running FreeNAS which was the target for snapshots via ZFS Replication made rebuilding everything very straightforward. Even the jails survived the move.

 

[NASbox]

The speed at which you can bring your data back into the pool is highly dependent on how you backed up your data. What method have you used?

I went through something similar and having another box running FreeNAS which was the target for snapshots via ZFS Replication made rebuilding everything very straightforward. Even the jails survived the move.

Thanks for the reply. I don't have a second system for mirroring, so I created a single Disk ZFS volume on a removable disk and did an rsync. Is there a better way to do this? For the moment, I think I can get everything to fit on one disk, although that disk is much fuller than it should be. After the expansion, I'll likely create several datasets, and copy some datasets to one disk, and the rest to another.

 

[nightshade00013]

You could snapshot and replicate. It would be more exact and preserve file attributes and dates better.

I had a single disk pool to begin with and just had some movies on it so I went the rsync route when I had my pool established as the attributes didn't matter.

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks for the reply. I don't have a second system for mirroring, so I created a single Disk ZFS volume on a removable disk and did an rsync. Is there a better way to do this? For the moment, I think I can get everything to fit on one disk, although that disk is much fuller than it should be. After the expansion, I'll likely create several datasets, and copy some datasets to one disk, and the rest to another.

If you have SATA or SAS ports to spare, connecting the disk that way gives a faster transfer rate, but what you did is fine. That is, until you have enough data that it won't fit on one disk, but it sounds like you have a plan for that too.

 

[NASbox]

You could snapshot and replicate. It would be more exact and preserve file attributes and dates better.

If you have SATA or SAS ports to spare, connecting the disk that way gives a faster transfer rate, but what you did is fine. That is, until you have enough data that it won't fit on one disk, but it sounds like you have a plan for that too.

It sounds like I should be using replication, but I have no idea how to do it.

 

[Chris Moore]

http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html?highlight=replication#replication-tasks

 

[NASbox]

http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html?highlight=replication#replication-tasks

Thanks for the reply Chris. I did see this, but I'm having trouble translating those instructions (recurring remote computer-to-computer replication) to my use case (manually initiated, non-recurring replication to a local volume that is manually mounted and isn't present at all times). I wish replication was an option, but at the moment I don't have the budget, or the physical space to accommodate this solution. (I'm a home user who went from a DNS323 several years ago to FreeNAS 8 with UFS USB drives for backup, and now FreeNAS 11U4 with a hot swap drive attached to the SATA controller, so I've come a long way, but a mirrored system isn't going to happen any time soon.)

I had no difficulty creating, manually detaching and re importing a volume, but after that I get stuck

1. How do I configure the replication task to replicate to /mnt/BACKUP0x (where /mnt/BACKUP0x is the name of the Volume (Pool?) that I attach to the system (using an Addonics hot swap tray)?
   At the moment FreNAS looks like this:
   /mnt/TANK (Main pool with several datasets)
   /mnt/TANK/library
   /mnt/TANK/video
   /mnt/TANK/music
   /mnt/TANK/cleanup
   /mnt/TANK/files
   and a second smal pool /mnt/SCRATCH (Used for backups only-I'll likely get rid of it when I expand TANK to 8 drives-it was my first expansion.)
   Not sure if I can get all of TANK on one big drive, but currently I have library rsynced to one drive, video, music, cleanup and files to a second drive and SCRATCH on a third drive.
   
2. How do I trigger the the replication operation to run on demand? (I would assume that unchecking Enabled would be an OK way to turn it off, but ideally I would like to script the operation. Currently, I mount the backup pool with the GUI and then run a script which identifies which pool is mounted and runs the appropriate rsync - this way I don't accidentally back up to the wrong backup drive).

I'm assuming based on the way ZFS works that replication just replicates differences efficiently (similar to rsync), but I wanted to check because efficient use of space on the backup vols is going to be super important. Other than TANK/files, everything else is pretty low update frequency, maybe 0.5-20GB/week depending on what I'm up to.
Any input/suggestions would be much appreciated.

 

[NASbox]

How can I do a manual local replication?

I have created a manual recursive snapshot of /mnt/TANK from the GUI.

I also have a blank disk spinning ready to receive the copy.

Can someone tell me how I can replicate the snapshot to the blank disk. (From the command line is fine - maybe even preferred.)

Thanks in advance for any advice/assistance.

 

[nightshade00013]

Might try this as a guide https://www.cod3r.com/2015/12/freenas-internal-backups/

 

[NASbox]

Might try this as a guide https://www.cod3r.com/2015/12/freenas-internal-backups/

Thanks @nightshade00013 for the reference. I was really hoping for something that I could script using ZFS send/receive. I did play with it a bit, but I had trouble getting the replication to work - I think I did something wrong with the keys. I may come back to this depending on what else I find.