Can I downgrade FreeNAS 8 to 7 or is trying a 8.2 BETA possible? and Nas4Free???

[t0ny]

Hi, I have installed FreeNAS 8. (I am a total FN Noob and all my exp is in Windows)

I plugged the USB pen in a brand new HP MicroServer (no monitor/input devices) waited a min or two then connected to the web gui and it was all running. Very impressive!
Everything I have set-up is working fine, 3 drives (no redundancy) shared (UFS) to my Windows 7 machines. At this point I'm thinking this is all excellent!

That's about 70% of what I want to do. I foolishly did not read the comparison chart and I now found out that I can't stream to my XBOX360 or run as an iTunes server.

So, looking through the forums I see many are sticking with version 7. I would like to change to something with support for the above, but without losing all the files on these UFS drives?

Options appear to be:

Downgrade to FreeNas 7
Switch to Nas4Free (This seems to be a supported version of 7 on a newer version of FreeBSD?)
Try FreeNAS beta 8.2 (Does a firmware upgrade take me to this or do I specify the ISO?)

As I said I am a noob and have no experience with FreeBSD I do not know how to get myself out of this situation.

Can I switch to any of these options without losing all my current data? The Beta scares me as I do not want to mess about too often!

Any hints/help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

 

[cyberjock]

I can't make any comments about FreeNAS 7 since I never used it and I know there's alot of if/buts to upgrading and downgrading, but it sounds like you should stay on version 8 and wait for the release version(or perhaps a release candidate) of 8.2 appears. The Betas are still somewhat unreliable and the plugins don't quite work perfectly yet. I also don't recommend running betas or release candidates if you care about your data. You don't want to be in the position of losing your data because you were beta testing.


If you read the manual on upgrading FreeNAS it will tell you which file you have to download. I believe it will be a .gz if i'm not mistaken.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I recommend upgrading to 8.2Beta3, I bet it would be less hastle then switching to 7 and in the future swithcing back, In my experience itunes server was ready (though I go with subsonic instead), I didn't test the mediastreamer so don't know if that's working. If you decide to upgrade just download the gui upgrade file for your current architecure (i386 or amd64) from sourceforge and upgrade in the gui. I didn't have any problems with the gui upgrade to 8.2Beta3 though make a config backup just incase.

 

[t0ny]

Thanks for the information, that's very helpful!

I agree that going with Beta would normally be a dodgy move, but I still have all my data on other disks at the moment so perhaps the beta is the right move to get me running!

Joshua: So I download the GUI Upgrade file 8.2Beta3 and do the Firmware upgrade (This should keep the original version 8 intact still I think for rollback?) and IF the upgrade goes successfully all my drives should be sat there unaware and working as before?

If that goes fine then I can look into the plugins?

Thanks again!

 

[t0ny]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8.2.0/BETA3/x64/ is the link to BETA 3, but the GUI download does not seem to work.

If I was to save the config file from 8.0.4, slap in a new USB with BETA3 on it into my server then load the config file would this reactive all my drives/ settings?

 

[paleoN]

If I was to save the config file from 8.0.4, slap in a new USB with BETA3 on it into my server then load the config file would this reactive all my drives/ settings?

Should work just fine. You need to reboot after the import. If not everything will still be on your 8.0.4 USB.