Moving Encrypted Drives

[teh]

We are running FreeNAS 0.7.2 Sabanda.

We have decided to move from FreeNAS to OpenFiler for better AD support.

However, we have one FreeNAS box that has encrypted drives containing important documents. With the recent hike in HDD prices, I would like to not have to strain my budget anymore by purchasing more drives. Is it possible to mount these drives in OpenFiler without data loss? Or is there some way to remove the encryption?

I am not at all experienced with disk encryption techniques; are the disks only accessible through FreeNAS?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[phoenix]

We are running FreeNAS 0.7.2 Sabanda.

We have decided to move from FreeNAS to OpenFiler for better AD support.

Why not move to FreeNAS 8 which has AD support?

 

[praecorloth]

My guess is that teh does not move to FreeNAS 8 because it does not support encryption. Quite the icky catch 22 there.


To the question at hand, I would think that there would be a way to decrypt the drives, but I don't know and a quick Google search isn't telling me anything. (By quick I mean, I didn't find anything in the space of a minute of looking.) You might have better luck posting this one at the FreeNAS 7 forum.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewforum.php?f=38

My recommendation would be to strain your budget, especially if this is business critical data. Mainly because there's no guarantee that OpenFiler will just pick up on a FreeNAS disk array even if you were to decrypt it. Then with your old instance of FreeNAS wiped out, would you be able to restore your business critical data in a new instance of FreeNAS so you could even access it? The whole thing just seems like tempting fate a little too much. There are 1TB Seagate drives available on Newegg for $139. Slow drives, but they'll work for backing up data.

At any rate, I'm sorry I can't be of more help, and I wish you luck in your endeavor. It does not look like it will be a lot of fun.

 

[Brand]

I don't believe that FreeNAS 8 setups up ZFS in a standard way and therefor can not be easily transferred to a different operating system. This has been document on the FreeNAS 8 forums somewhere.

 

[ProtoSD]

I don't believe that FreeNAS 8 setups up ZFS in a standard way and therefor can not be easily transferred to a different operating system. This has been document on the FreeNAS 8 forums somewhere.

ZFS isn't any different on FreeNAS, it's the GPT partitioning that makes it incompatible with Solaris. You can import it on other OS's as long as they can handle the GPT partitioning.


My question is why is this question being asked in these forums? There are FreeNAS 7 forums where questions about version 7 should be posted (Link in titlebar at top of page). Also, what version of ZFS are we talking about? I wasn't aware of encryption on ZFS until version 30/31??

 

[Brand]

ZFS isn't any different on FreeNAS, it's the GPT partitioning that makes it incompatible with Solaris. You can import it on other OS's as long as they can handle the GPT partitioning.

I never said that ZFS was different, I said it was setup differently. Using GPT does classify it as being setup differently (than MBR which has been standard for many many years). I knew there was something that could cause trouble with moving a ZFS drive(s) to a none FreeNAS 8 system but I just didn't remember what it was.