Before wiping out install...

[Diekatzchen]

My FreeNAS box has gotten kind of flaky, and at this point is an unholy kludge of settings I forgot why I set, so I want to start over. Obviously, though, I want to keep my data. The drive all my files are stored on is ZFS. I know I'm supposed to do something to make sure I can access the files when I reinstall, but damned if I know what. Can anyone help me?

 

[SweetAndLow]

You can just rest to factory default settings if you want. It's under the settings tab I think. Just don't click anything that says wipe data or if it's red a looks scary.

 

[Diekatzchen]

Cool, I'll try that.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I know I'm supposed to do something to make sure I can access the files when I reinstall

You might be thinking of what's known as detaching the pool, but you only need to do that if you're moving your storage drives to a different system, or if you actually want to wipe out the data.

 

[Diekatzchen]

So as long as I don't rearrange the drives, I don't need to detach the pool before, say, reinstalling freenas? I managed to fix the problem I was having without blowing away my install, but it would be good to know for future reference.

 

[BigDave]

So as long as I don't rearrange the drives

FreeNAS/ZFS doen't give a hoot about the physical "order" of the connectors (data cables), the meta data
contained on the disks maintains their configuration within the pool.

I don't need to detach the pool before, say, reinstalling freenas?

Not at all. When performing a re-install of FreeNAS, first keep back (save) a copy of your configuration file on your client. If
you are not changing versions of FreeNAS the pool will automagically get imported without further steps from you. If however
you are changing/upgrading to a newer version of FreeNAS, you would need to use the GUI to *import* the pool. The last step
is to upload your saved configuration file (to return all their settings exactly as it was from your previous installation).
The FreeNAS manual gives info on how to do this, it's really straight forward.