External USB support & UFS

[KenNashua]

I used to some time in the past, have an external USB drive that was formatted with UFS and a custom rsync script that would do daily backups.

Could someone confirm my understanding?

1. Import Disk will actually copy an mounted USB disk onto a ZFS dataset resulting in files that are both on the unmodified USB drive as well as my ZFS pool
2. FreeNAS can no longer mount a external USB UFS disk via the GUI
3. A external USB disk can be mounted via mount /dev/{device} to a mount point and copied to as it used to, but not in any way supported.

Is all that correct? I'd like to have a redundant (already utilize mirrors) copy of the data that can be easily accessed by a windows server should disaster strike. ZFS doesn't seem to fit that bill, though I could jump through hoops to mount in a recreated FreeNAS or FreeBSD system.

 

[Adrian]

I used to do that, for the same reason.

I stopped and switched to using ZFS formatted external USB drives when I realised that 11.1-U5 no longer seemed to support labels (no /dev/ufs) directory. Mounting using the UFS partition name was still possible, as was writing. Who knows what functionality other than that needed to support Import Disk will vanish in the future?

I have most of my data backed up by ZFS replication to 2 other systems, and have only ever used the USB backups to transfer data from old to new FreeNAS servers.

Have you considered considered creating your backups on your windows system, using, for example, Cygwin and rsync against Samba shares?

 

[KenNashua]

I used to do that, for the same reason.
Have you considered considered creating your backups on your windows system, using, for example, Cygwin and rsync against Samba shares?

I did consider that...then it's another system I need to keep on or have auto-power on for backup purposes which seems to add a lot more complexity than should be required.

I guess I can consider ZFS external...