Need Semi-Disaster Recovery Help

[indivision]

I have:

Server A (Primary Server):​

4 1.5TB WD Green Drives striped and mirrored (RAID10). 1 of those drives is toast.​

​

Server B (Backups Only):​

1 2TB HD.​

I know that it would be relatively easy to simply replace the 1 toasted drive in Server A and re-build. I've done that before. However, I don't like the odd 1.5TB size of the drives and the server is mis-configured to the wrong ASHIFT. So, I have ordered 4 2TB WD Red Drives to replace the drives in Server A and re-configure it to the correct ASHIFT. Server B should have the files backed up from Server A as I have it running nightly replication of key folders.

Can someone point to or provide the steps I would need to take to get the data on my old drives over to the newly configured system with the new drives?

I could get into the old server files and copy them over to various machines on the network, set up the server with the new drives and copy the files back in. But, that doesn't seem very safe. I've transferred large amounts of files like that before only to find later that entire folders didn't go through somehow.

It seems like there must be a more elegant way to re-build from the replicated data on Server B. But, it's beyond my knowledge of FreeNAS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[danb35]

Does Server A have capacity to hold all 8 drives? If so, install the new drives in Server A and set them up in a new pool, then replicate the old pool to the new pool. Something like this:

Code:

# zfs snapshot -r oldpool@snap1
# zfs send -R oldpool@snap1 | zfs recv -F newpool

If Server A doesn't have room for all the drives at the same time, you can install the new drives in Server B and build them into a new pool. Set up a replication task from the old pool in server A to the new pool in server B. Then detach the old pool in server A and the new pool in server B, remove the old drives and install the new drives in server A, and auto-import the new pool.

 

[indivision]

Thank you danb35.

It may be possible to get all 8 drives hooked up loosely to Server A. Definitely not installed into the case, etc. Before I look into that possibility, with the method you describe, would I still be able to configure the new server with the 4 new drives to use the correct ASHIFT?

Same question on the second method. Can I accomplish those steps after creating a fresh new server install? Or, would the replication over-ride things and leave me with the bad ASHIFT setting?

(I could be confusing what ASHIFT applies to exactly. All I really know about it is that it creates a warning in FreeNAS that it's wrong in my setup and that it causes a performance hit.)

 

[danb35]

The replication will not affect the ASHIFT setting.

 

[indivision]

Ok. If I install FreeNAS using a USB plugged into Server B, wouldn't that affect its configuration? Would I then re-install FreeNAS after making the copy using Server A. Then just import the drives/pools?

 

[danb35]

Why are you asking about reinstalling FreeNAS? Create a new pool, replicate the data, remove the old pool. No need to reinstall.

 

[indivision]

Thank you.

I thought that I would need to re-install in order to configure FreeNAS to use the correct ASHIFT setting. No?

Unfortunately, I only have 6 SATA ports on Server A and 2 on Server B. So, I can't do the 8 drives on A or all 4 on B.

Isn't there a way to just set up Server A with the new drives and pull the backed up data off of Server B? Then I could let the old drives from A sit in a closet untouched for a while in case I find that something went wrong pulling from Server B to the new drives.

I apologize if I'm way off on anything. I definitely have a lot to learn about server technologies.

 

[danb35]

There's no need to reinstall--creating a new pool under a current version of FreeNAS will make it with the correct ASHIFT setting.

Yes, I believe you can do what you describe, essentially replicating from the backup on server B. I'm just not familiar with that process, and anything over the network will be slower than if you were using drives directly connected.

 

[indivision]

Thank you. Just for the sake of keeping the old drives easy to bring back up, I'm going to temporarily retire the USB that had the old settings and install of FreeNAS on it.

Pretty easy to install it again on a new USB.

Now, I'm looking at a different problem. The Volume Manager has changed since I last created a volume. I'm trying to create a RAID10 array. But, it's not clear how to do that.

Previously, I would create a 2 drive mirror and then extend it with the 2 other drives. The manager is not giving me an option to make a 2 drive mirror (only stripe and a few others). If I press the "+" sign for the drives it populates all 4 drives and defaults to mirror. Is that default setting RAID10? Or, is that just two sets of unstriped, mirrored pairs?

 

[indivision]

I think I got it by going to the "manual" section of the manager...