How I Upgraded freenas .7x to 8.2 successfully without loosing Data

[osallah]

All,

I know this is a common question and often asked in different ways. Can I upgrade freenas .7x to 8x? OR how do I upgrade from .7x to 8x? The common answer I found was NO to both questions but I will tell you how I did it in less than 30minutes from downloading the ISO to accessing my data. I will attempt to explain this without any confusion, so follow me along.

I had 3-2TB disks and freenas .7x was installed on 4GB us stick. This part may not be relevant to you.
My daughter was fascinated by the blinking light on the USB key so she removed it and started playing with it. To keep the peace I let her play with it knowing very well it holds key information to access 3.6TB worth of Data. Somehow, the thing shattered and i don't know how. What I do know is that I had no backup of my data and or the config file. Now I feel like an Imbesile! The important thing for me is my daughter must remain happy while I severely abuse myself for not doing what I could have done to prevent that disaster. She had access to it, and the first rule to securing data is: ACCESS. She had physical Access.

If you needed to pay attention to this write up and wanted to attempt it, this is IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here is how I got out of that Jam:

- I purchased a micro-SD card and a USB adapter called : elago Mobile Nano II USB 2.0 microSDHC Flash Memory Card Reader
- I downloaded Freenas 8.2 and burned the ISO to a DVD
- I installed freenas on the SD-CARD and rebooted. (here I assume you know that I still have my old disk and data inside the computer and I also assume you know how to install freenas)
- I logged into the Webgui and headed straight for the storage tab and clicked on volumes.
This part is really important so follow along carefully.
You noticed I did not add disk because they are already in there.
- In volumes, I clicked auto import for volumes.
-what this did is import all three disk and maintained the volume I created.
-I then opened a shell window within the freenas GUI and ran the following command "zpool upgrade" this command in a way ensures your pre-formatted drives are now ZFSv15
- Since I knew the names of the shares I created before I lost my system, I went into Shares, CIFS and created the same exact names and browsed to the individual folders and applied the shares.
- the moment you hit Save or apply, freenas will enable CIFS shares for you in services.
- I then created the users and passwords for the shares
- I restarted freenas and accessed my data.

This is exactly what I did and others may have a different way. I can answer question, and I hope you don't have any because this is simple and straight forward.

Good Luck and thank you to the Freenas brains.

 

[cyberjock]

You didn't "ugprade" at all. You simply reinstalled FreeNAS from scratch and set up all of your settings again. Your steps are exactly the same as if you had been using the latest version and your USB key failed and didn't have a config file backed up. An upgrade does not require to you setup anything in FreeNAS again(minus any new features of course).

For people with FreeNAS .7x you will ALWAYS have to setup FreeNAS from scratch. For people with lots of users(100+) this is not something to take lightly.

 

[osallah]

Okay...! let me re-word my title:
How I "wentfrom" Freenas .7x to 8.2 successfully without loosing Data
How I "Upgraded" freenas .7x to 8.2 successfully without loosing Data

The Fact is: Same hardware (except USB key), same data, same volumes, same shares, exact configuration. just a different OS. if that cannot be called upgrading, I don't know what could.
Oh! remember that command: "zpool upgrade"

My point was simplicity.This was clean and simple.

No challenge intended. Feel free to re-write, edit, delete as you please. I bet you someone will find this helpful and I am just sharing. Remember this, there are many ways to skin a cat. Color=colour

Call it whatever you want but give this thread a chance and someone may find it useful.

 

[osallah]

By the way if you read it carefully despite my title wording, my first paragraph, the third sentence already recognized there was NO UPGRADING: "The common answer I found was NO to both questions but I will tell you how I did it in less than 30minutes from downloading the ISO to accessing my data. I will attempt to explain this without any confusion, so follow me along."

 

[cyberjock]

I would argue that you did lose data. You lost your configuration. Yes, you were able to recreate the configuration without much effort. But for alot of users that have setup alot of users, file shares, etc. "upgrading" by recreating their configuration from scratch just isn't an option. That's why this warning is in the manual:

Upgrades from FreeNAS™ 0.7x are unsupported. The system has no way to import configuration settings from 0.7x versions of FreeNAS. However, the volume importer should be able to import volumes created with FreeNAS™ 0.7x.

I don't delete/edit threads(partly because I don't have rights to, but also it's inappropriate if you simply disagree with someone). Your configuration was obviously quite simple to reproduce. For people that setup file shares and permissions and have lots of settings, "upgrading" just isn't an option. I wasn't around when the first 8.x version of FreeNAS was released, but I'd bet a large number of people "upgraded" to 8.x and recreated their settings easily(exactly how you did). But some people have large complex configurations that are not easily recreated.

The reality of the situation is that your upgrade path isn't very novel. I'm sorry, but it just isn't. Nothing you did is amazing or unexpected. It was always meant to work this way. The problem with upgrading has NEVER been about losing data, it has ALWAYS been about losing your configuration.