How to restore data in case of Freenas OS drive failure

[cy8berpunk]

I've a freenas setup with two 3 tb hdd's in a mirror setup.
I have two questions:
in case one of them fails, I can plug a new one in and restore everything via the Web GUI?
And second, when the drive with freenas OS on it fails, can I than still externally read from the hdd's or reimport the "setup" on a new Freenas os without having the config files?

Greets, Paul

 

[Glorious1]

Yes, you can just follow the user manual to replace the failed drive. 9.5.1. Replacing a Failed Disk. You basically just tell the GUI to offline the failed drive, then shutdown (unless you have true hotswap), physically replace the disk, boot, then tell the GUI to replace it with the selected disk.

You should periodically, and after any major changes, save your config file to a local computer (Web GUI > System > General > Save Config). If your boot pool fails, you reinstall on a new boot device, then import your config file.

 

[cy8berpunk]

Let‘s assume I didn‘t save the config file but did not apply any encryption, could I theoretically recover data from one of the two drives, with for example an zfs toll?
Thx for your reply.

 

[cy8berpunk]

tool*

 

[Glorious1]

Somewhere on the forums someone recently posted a path on the system dataset where you could retrieve the configuration, but you would have to search for that. There is also a cron task that you can set to save your configuration file to a convenient place every night.

 

[cy8berpunk]

Somewhere on the forums someone recently posted a path on the system dataset where you could retrieve the configuration, but you would have to search for that. There is also a cron task that you can set to save your configuration file to a convenient place every night.

So there is no way of recovering the data when the OS Drive fails and you don't have a backup of the config file?

 

[danb35]

could I theoretically recover data from one of the two drives, with for example an zfs toll?

Yes, simply import the pool in a new installation. This is the whole reason that the OS is on a separate device.