Best way to "redo" freenas

[Bruce Wilfong]

I have been running Freenas since 9.1 and now on 11.2, over the years a lot has changed with my pools as well as original user I set up, plugin, etc. I basically only run radarr, sonarr, libarr, sab, plex and emby, plus use my freenas server for some basic file sharing. Learned a lot over the years and finally reached a point where I have a degraded pool (12 drives of mixture of 4tb and 3tb drives) that I cant seem to fix easily. So I basically just want to blow everything up and start over (new pools, new pool names, new users, etc.)

I want basically copy my existing data (tv shows, movies, music, home movies, shared files) to a 12TB external drive, blow away everything and install FreeNas frees, then copy the data back over. I dont care about configuration files, or plug-in (installed these a million times). I definitely want to redo my pool(s) and use less hard drives. What I am trying to do is find the fastest and most efficient way to copy my data;

1) hook up an external USB drive to FreeNas, mount and use MC (midnight commander) to copy everything over, re-install Freenas and copy everything back or
2) hook up the USB to my laptop and copy everything over....or does it really matter.

Any suggestions ?

 

[Constantin]

Undoubtedly, a native import will run faster... so if you can attach a drive directly and import into the pool from there, that ought to do the trick. If there is a way to ensure that the data copied correctly, that would be a bonus, but you could always do that with a later rsync product like carbon copy cloner on the Mac.

I would make at least 2 backups.

I would also consider rebuilding the pool from scratch with one type of drives. For example, I standardized around 10TB drives here not because I needed the capacity right away but because it allowed me to use one drive type for both the NAS as well as the backup array. So I only have to keep one drive as a spare and a Z3 pool is pretty resistant to damage in the first place.

 

[toadman]

Yes, if you can attach the 12TB internally (SATA/SAS) and create a pool, that will be fastest and you'd still have ZFS on that copy of the data. And I too would create 2 copies of important data. With everything on 1 drive you have a single point of failure.

On the rebuild, if you do use multiple drive sizes you'd ideally want to keep the drives in each vdevs the same size at a minimum.

 

[Bruce Wilfong]

So I did attach the 12TB external USB drive as a new pool and copying everything over (about 6TB of data), so it says 53 hours to copy. Once done I will blow everything away are re-install Freenas with new pools.

I have 5 x 4tb drives and 7 x 3 TB drives, thinking of of doing 2 pools;
1st Pool 4 x 4tb drives (3 with 1 raid), then 2nd pool 4 x 3tb (3 with 1 raid). The second pool one I can replace with new 4 or 6tb as time goes on.

 

[Constantin]

Negative on multiple pools.

I’d suggest one pool, two VDEvs with 5 drives each, raid z2. Better performance, less drama.

first VDEV with 4tb drives, the second with the 3TB drives.

 

[Bruce Wilfong]

Goit it, can you do 2 VDEVs through the wizard

 

[blueether]

Goit it, can you do 2 VDEVs through the wizard

Yes you can, add the first disks to the vdev, the click the "Add Data" button and add the second vdev:

 

[Bruce Wilfong]

Got it, thanks all