One Click Recovery of SCALE

[emsicz]

Is there a good way to completely backup TrueNAS SCALE? I want following scenario to work:

1. Do backup.
2. Take the OS drive from my SCALE machine out and destroy it with fire of thousand suns.
3. Put new OS drive into my SCALE machine.
4. Use backup from step 1 to do recovery.
5. Machine now runs as if nothing has ever happened.

I have VMs, pools, datasets, users, shares, network settings. I've spent weeks setting it up. You can see from my signature I've had a lot of problems with it. I would reeeeeaaaaly appreciate if I can make a backup of my TrueNAS instance and in case of disaster, simply recover all my hard work from a backup.

 

[Arwen]

Their is a backup configuration option in the GUI. That is supposed to backup all the details necessary to recover a failed boot OS drive.

That said, SCALE is such a new product, something might have slipped through the cracks. Especially with the newer features of SCALE, like the containers or VMs, (which are different VMs than what TrueNAS Core uses).


It is also possible to have a cronjob backup your configuration. I have one that sends the backup configuration to my data pool, with the understanding that it may be a more complex recovery than if I saved it to my desktop.

 

[whodat]

Their is a backup configuration option in the GUI

WebGUI > System Settings > General > Manage Configuration > Download File

Be sure to tick the 'Export Password Secret Seed' box, otherwise your self-signed cert, and share (e.g. SMB) passwords (and perhaps other credentials) won't carry over to your "new" system.

You can find the same config and secret files at /data/freenas-v1.db and /data/pwenc_secret respectively, in case you want to create a cron job as @Arwen mentioned, to regularly back these up somewhere safe .

I have used these many times to date, successfully bringing across all Apps, Pools, Shares, Settings, etc.