Moving Volume AND snapshots to another box

[Dotty]

I have a FreeNAS box with a 2TB volume and a year's worth of weekly snapshots.
How do I move it to another ZFS device? (FreeNAS, FreeBSD etc)
Id like to preserve obviusly the data, but all the historical snapshots as well.
Im running 9.10.1-U4
Thanks

 

[Chris Moore]

Do you just want to move the existing pool to new hardware or are you wanting to copy what you have to a new set of disks in different hardware?

 

[Dotty]

I just want to copy what I have. Different Hardware, potentially different OS (but still ZFS).

 

[Chris Moore]

If you can temporarily connect both pools to the same system, you can quickly transfer from one to the other using this method.

First take a snapshot of the pool you want to copy using this command: zfs snapshot -r <poolname>@<snap-name>
The exact command that I use is this: zfs snapshot -r Emily@manual-29Jan2019

The manual snapshot will include all the previous content of the pool, including the older snapshots you are interested in saving.

Once you have a snapshot, you can use zfs send and receive to send that snapshot to another pool using this command:

zfs send -R <poolname>@<snap-name> | zfs receive -F <new-pool>

The exact command I used to backup my existing pool to a new set of disks:

zfs send -R Emily@manual-29Jan2019 | zfs receive -F Irene

If you can't connect both pools to one system, you can still use zfs send to send to another system.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbinw/index.html

 

[Dotty]

That is very helpful. I will try that today! Thanks a lot.

 

[Chris Moore]

That is very helpful. I will try that today! Thanks a lot.

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