how to upgrade from 8.2 to 11.1?

[ClarkYoung]

I inherited a Simple NAS box that has 4 disks in it. Each disk is it’s own ZFS volume. Can I easily upgrade this thing by simply booting off of an 11.1 thumb drive?

What happens to the existing storage and shares? Does it automagically just mount itself and share it’s CIFs?

To be more specific, it looks like the build is FreeNAS-8.3.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r12825).
The platform is AMD C-60 APU
Memory is 8GB

I’m not running anything on it. I’m simply sharing a movie library to a home network. The PLEX server is running on a different machine entirely.

 

[Ericloewe]

Each disk is it’s own ZFS volume.

Ouch. That's not a very good setup.

Can I easily upgrade this thing by simply booting off of an 11.1 thumb drive?

All your data would be there, but your settings would not, including shares.

You can try to upgrade piecewise, which is your best bet if you don't want to redo shares and other settings. Something like 9.2.1.9, then 9.3, then 11.0 and from there to 11.1 or 11.2 once that is out or if you feel adventurous.

 

[ClarkYoung]

There are only 4 volumes. And there are only 4 shares. Seems like it would be less work to just boot off the 11.1 Thumb drive and then create 4 new shares.

Is that foolish?

 

[Ericloewe]

Well, you also have to setup your users and scrub/SMART tasks and such again. You do get more certainty that things won't break because of old cruft, though.

 

[ClarkYoung]

I went ahead and created a bootable 11.1 thumb drive. Once it booted I imported the 4 volumes and then shared them. Everything worked perfectly.