Mirrored USB System Drives?

[SilverJS]

Guys,

As per the title - right now, my system is running fine, but I'd like to have some redundancy for the system drive. Is it possible to run FreeNAS with the system (USB Flash) drives in RAID1?

Thanks!

 

[ProtoSD]

That would be sorta cool, but FreeNAS just loads from a compressed image on the flash drive into RAM, so it would be like having RAID1 with your RAM. All the changes you make from the GUI get written back into a database, and a few other config files/logs get written back to flash, but the point is to NOT write to flash to make it last. So the answer is no, but maybe you could setup a Cron script with rsync and back up the config files somewhere (not your pool).

 

[SilverJS]

I see. So, if for some reason my USB drive were to crash, I'd only have to re-burn another one, import my config file, and everything would be exactly the same as it was?

 

[ProtoSD]

Yes, in theory. You might need to auto-import your pools, and if you had any custom config files edited from the command line those would need to be backed up, like loader.conf. Although I asked if they could add some way to back that up with the config.

 

[SilverJS]

I see, thanks. So, the "new" FreeNAS, once my config would be loaded up, would "see" the ZFS pool on the drives? I'd just have to import it?

Speaking of which, any progress on having shell (read : command line!) access via the web GUI?

 

[ProtoSD]

You might not need to import it, I'm not sure if it checks for the zpool.cache file or something, but otherwise you would just import it.

I'm sure at some point they'll have shell access from the GUI, but I think they have their plate full right now trying to get the core features stable before they add bells and whistles.