Reinstallation Process

[ericv]

After upgrading to 9.10 I've had a ton of problems. Not sure if it is a USB OS drive failure or an issue created during the upgrade. Anyways I am going to buy new USB drives and reinstall 9.10 from scratch.

I currently have 6 x 4tb drives running in z-raid2. I've read over the documentation and I am reading that I can simply put in 2 new USB drives, install my mirrored installation. It will detect my 6 drives and let me import them.

I am just asking for comfort. Is this how it really works? What are my risks (what can I do wrong)? I really don't want to lose my data and I'd rather not spend $400 - $500 on drives so I can backup the data locally and I have no idea how long it would take back-up and restore from AWS.

I appreciate your help.

 

[depasseg]

Yes, this is the way it works. Your OS is completely separate from the data, and the data disk config reside on the disks themselves so they will import on another install. I would make 2 suggestions:
1. Backup your configuration and apply after the install (helps if you have a lot of share, snapshot or other settings configured).
2. If you want to retain your historical "resource" graphs, move the system dataset to the data pool.

 

[ericv]

Thank you. I didn't think about #1. I'll do that. I was a bit worried about that. I am assuming I'll still need to re-setup my plugs (plex, transmission, btsync, ...). Will the config keep my snapshot settings?

 

[depasseg]

Yes it will. The snapshots themselves reside in the pool, but snapshot settings, replication settings, etc will all come over with the config backup and restore.

Oh, and you want to make sure that the version to are backing up is the same version you restore onto to.

 

[ericv]

Oh, and you want to make sure that the version to are backing up is the same version you restore onto to.

By this you simply mean make sure I restore to same version of FreeNAS I took the configs from?

I was hoping to go right to 9.10. It has to be the exact version?

 

[depasseg]

If you are on 9.10, then you should be fine backing up the config, reinstalling 9.10 and then restoring the backed up config.

 

[ericv]

@depasseg - I finally had time over the weekend to reinstall. I moved from dual USB boot drives to dual 120GB SSDs. I know 120GB is too much, but I couldn't get smaller ones cheaper.

I ended up going right to 9.10 as upgrading from 9.3 to 9.10 is when I started seeing problems. I think my issue (I think you helped me with figuring it out) was the USB drives. I read somewhere on here recently that moving to SSD was a better idea.

Thanks for the help.