Creating a temporary (transit) backup of a raidz2 volume.

[adamthekiwi]

Hi all,

I've got a FreeNAS 11.1 file server, which I'm shipping to New Zealand (I'm moving there). It has a single raidz2 volume, based around 4 1TB SSDs. As insurance for the data, I've bought 4 new 1TB SSDs and my intention was to create a backup. I thought the correct way to do this was to create a snapshot and replicate it to an identical volume created on the new SSDs, then just pull them and carry them with me - but I'm a bit confused about how to do it.

I've created an identical volume, and a manual snapshot - but I can't work out how to replicate it. Can anyone help?

Thanks - Adam...

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Do you have enough SAS ports to connect the other set of drives? If so, my suggestion would be to build a new volume and copy all the files from the old volume to it. Then unmount that volume and take those drives with you. As a really rough example, that would be something like this.

Code:

cd /mnt/Original-RAID-Z-Voume
find . -print | cpio -pvmdu /mnt/New-CYA-Volume

Let the bits crunch, and then you have a full freestanding copy. No worries about trying to rebuild from a snapshot or anything like that. I would also make sure you save the configuration to something external that you take with you as well.

 

[adamthekiwi]

Thanks Elliot. I'd thought there might be a more clever way of doing it, but you're right - KISS.

As it happened (for anyone following in my footsteps) I used rsync, so my steps were:
- installed the 4 new drives (I've built my server with hot-swap trays, and I had 4 spare);
- created an identical raidz2 volume and named it 'backup-volume' (catchy, eh?);
- ssh'd to my server and ran `rsync -aAX ./mainstore ./backup-volume` in the background - it took a few hours to push all the data across;
- detached backup-volume (taking great care *not* to check the "Mark the disks as new" box!);
- took the trays out and then put them back in (in a different order);
- imported the volume and confirmed that the files were there (I only checked the top-level folders, but I'm confident that rsync did its stuff);
- detached the volume, extracted the disks again, took them out of the hot-swap trays and returned the trays to the system.

Now I feel a lot happier about giving my fileserver into the tender care of the movers!