LOST MY POOLS AND IN THE MIDDLE OF REINSTALLING FREENAS 11.2

[jrmbdl]

I am stressed and worried that i REALLY messed up! i have been running FreeNAS now for 2 weeks, still migrating data from my old dlink nas drives... i just changed the user of a jail from "sonarr" --> "a user i configured in gui". when i clicked on save i was left with then spinning "disc" for over 30 minutes. i refreshed the page and the page couldnt be found... i restarted Freenas and was presented with abunch of errors regarding zpools that flew by the screen... once booted i was greeted with NO POOLS or DATASETS :( i rebooted again and nothing fixed it. i attempted to import zfs filesystems but only 1 of the 3 would import (the one with no drive encryption). of course noob mistake i didnt back my decryption keys of the other two drives as i was still migrating. to make things stressful. i do not have access to 3 TB's of data as i had to recycle those drives from my old nas to my new one formatting it... ANYWAYS currently where i believe i made a mistake is, i did this as someone on the forums said switching cables on the hard drives fixed their issue, and now the system cannot find boot pool. Now im currently reinstalling the Frenas O/S on that same drive retaining the boot dataset, and adding a new boot environment. any helpful words of advice for someone who is still learning the O/S? and fixing my datasets/pools

 

[m0nkey_]

attempted to import zfs filesystems but only 1 of the 3 would import (the one with no drive encryption). of course noob mistake i didnt back my decryption keys of the other two drives as i was still migrating.

When creating an encrypted pool, you are prompted to backup the encryption keys. Without them, you will be unable to unlock the pool and your data will be lost.

I would strongly suggest reading the FreeNAS user guide to get started.

http://doc.freenas.org/11.2/

 

[styno]

any helpful words of advice for someone who is still learning the O/S

Don't install beta or release candidates.
Take some time on a brand new system to make sure all hardware is working as expected. Your issue sounds more like a HW fault than a mistake or misconfiguration.
Take backups of everything, this includes data, config and encryption keys.
Raid is not a backup.
Set-up notifications and smart checks.
Set-up recursive snapshots on the whole pool and keep them for quite a while.