LOL, you made me laugh with your second paragraph. Too funny.
As Reader's Digest used to say, laughter is the best medicine - I hope you overdosed! :)
If your drives are encrypted then I believe there is definitely another step otherwise it's really as simple as creating a back up your TrueNAS configuration (with the passwords) and being able to restore them.
There is one pool and 3 datasets, all are unencrypted.
To create a backup of my configuration then all I need to do is System Settings -> General -> Manage Configuration -> Download File, tick off "Export Password Secret Seed" and I am done?
Now, I am curious what additional steps I'd need to do if I had encrypted the pool or datasets (granted, I did not)? But that may change in the future.
For Scale all I did was go to the top of the forums page, click on Documentation -> (Left Column) TrueNAS SCALE -> (Left Column) Download or Print -> It will open a file called SCALE22.02Docs.pdf So there is the PDF you were unable to locate. I would not print it out, 899 pages, it's a few pages. Next scroll down to page 2, look for 3.10: System Settings, in specific you are looking for the link 3.10.2.2 Managing the System Configuration. When you read that section you will note there is related content that may apply to you.
Okay, yeah, I just saw that. It is basically HTML in PDF format, ugh. For now, I will not print that as that is just plain ugly. I do hope that there is a real PDF version of the documentation soon that prints nicely and is a native PDF not a "print to PDF" deal.
SCALE is still new so do not expect the document to be immediately available for Bluefin. It will come.
Yes, I knew that but did not really think about it as I think of TrueNAS/FreeNAS as having existed for a long time.. I know SCALE is new, but thinking of TrueNAS as new was not what came to mind.
My advice is, BEFORE you implement a system and store lots of data on it, test the system out. Simulate failures and try to recover from them. That is what I did when I started to use FreeNAS. In your case, if you already have a system established, I'd make a backup as I've suggested, shut the system down, remove the original boot drive and install the new one, install TrueNAS on it, and restore the configuration file, and see if it works. If it doesn't work then shut it down and install your original boot drive. Now figure out what went wrong.
That is exactly what I had planned to do anyway (substituting a different boot drive)! I agree though, I should have done more simulated failure tests, but nothing at this point has failed either.
When you ask for help you need to be extremely clear with the folks on the other end. We have no idea what you have going on and if we guess, we could be putting your data at risk which is something we do not like doing. Which is why the Forum Rules are so important. You should read those and post the requested information when asking your next question because other than what I've told you so far, anything more would be a pure guess not knowing your system setup/configuration.
And if you are not findling the answer in the Scale Docs file, look in the Core Docs file. These systems will be similar and most of the instructions will be identical with the exception of possibly the GUI. They are different but they were designed similarly for operation/control.
I do appreciate the fact that my use case was not as granular and specific as I would normally have instantiated for a technical question. However, in my defense, I figured backing up the configuration would be a pretty straight forward endeavor notwithstanding the depth of the configuration. I realize now that is not necessarily the case.
I imagine in the future (once TrueNAS SCALE has existed for some time) there will be some published "cookbooks" and such for TrueNAS too. Now looking at the CORE docks I outright did not think of, but will try that for sure next time.
I used OpenMediaVault for a while but I like TrueNAS much more as it is intrinsically using ZFS and I have older drives, so that matters to me.
I also like the idea that TrueNAS is heading off into the virtualization realm. I know it is not currently at the level that something like ProxMox is (with live migration of VMs and all kinds of other nifty virtualization features out the wazoo), but it would be nice if TrueNAS gets there. I am also investigating running TrueNAS under ProxMox. I did try that once and I got it to work with pass-through of the PCI SAS controller on the x3650 but I ended deciding to go bare metal for now as I have several unused servers.
One last point is that I am really glad the TrueNAS has taken the path of Linux. I used to work with BSD a lot (back in my SunOS 4.1.3 days), but most things have gone Linux and its easier to just know Linux well. Now, if the folks at pfSense would just migrate to Linux I'd be BSD free of FreeBSD (so to speak). By the way, I have nothing against BSD except that it is different enough from Linux that its not worth using if I can avoid it. Already I need to know 3 different ways of updating packages and maintaining Linux systems betwixt Ubuntu, SuSE, and RedHat (for professional purposes in maintaining customer servers).
Thank you so very much for your most complete and detailed reply.
Stuart
