Confused about ESXi and Freenas

[Nightowl805]

Is it easier to recover data from a virtualized Freenas or just from a straight Freenas setup. While it may be fun to play around with ESXi and install a couple of other VM's to learn, I still value safety and hands off approach the most. Plex, Time Machine, crashplan.........

So which way is safer to recover data from. It doesn't appear to difficult the initial install through ESXi.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Neither is easy to recover data but using esxi is more complicated and usually not what you want to do unless you know you want to use it. I'm not sure you mean what you think you mean when you say recover data. That isn't something you should ever have to do unless it is from a backup. Ability to recover data off a disk shouldn't be something you are concerned with.