Replication fails with "No incremental base on dataset..."

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Sep 13, 2014
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I've just built a brand new server (yay!) (the WIP server in my sig), complete with new disks which I have created a new pool with called dozer . Whilst the new hardware was being tested, I connected the new disks / dozer pool to my current primary FreeNAS server and I created a replication task to replicate all the data on my tank pool to dozer. Before creating the new replication task, I took the opertunity to prune some old snapshots and to recreate my periodic snapshot task so that it was more inline with my requirements (in regards to retention policies). I then ran the replication task manually.

The data replicated from tank to dozer/tank and everything was a-okay. The problem was though, that the hardware testing for my new server was still ongoing and in the meantime, I continued to use my tank pool, and now that the time has come to move to my new hardware, I've just been trying to run the replication task again and I get the following error.

Code:
No incremental base on dataset 'tank/Backup' and replication from scratch is not allowed.


If I remove the tank/Backup dataset from the replication task, then the task fails in the same way on another dataset.

I've tried recreating the replication task and the snapshot task. I've tried running the tasks manually and on a schedule. The result is always the same. If I enable the option to "Replicate from scratch if incremental is not possible", then the replication task runs, but that means that I'm having to, well... start from scratch [*see edit]. It doesn't solve the issue. An issue that will still be there when I have each pool in separate servers and start trying to replicate via SSH.

If I replicate tank to a different dataset on dozer, say... dozer/pleaseworkthistime/tank, then the replication works... the first time it is run. If it's run a second time, I get the exact same errors.

What the heck?

Am I being stupid?

Why is there no incremental base on the destination datasets?


[EDIT] I've enabled the "Replicate from scratch if incremental is not possible" option and it doesn't take that long to replicate from scratch as I had remember it taking when I was playing around with replication via SSH. Whether that's due to the speed advantages of local replication or that replication speed has improved with newer versions of FreeNAS, I don't know. But it might also be because the dataset in question isn't being completely recreated from scratch.... perhaps my understanding of how replication works is as lacking as this post makes it seam.

The other thing I've noticed is that when creating a replication task, it says that 2 snapshots have been found. I currently have two snapshot tasks, a daily recursive snapshot that is kept for 2 weeks, and an hourly snapshot that is kept for 1 week but said task is currently. I've also read that replication tasks can only have one "base". So if I was to replicate both snapshot tasks, I'd have to have unique destination datasets for each snapshot base. This got me think... could my issues be caused by the replication task, replicating all snapshots from source, inccluding snapshots from old snapshot tasks and the now disabled hourly snapshot, and as these snapshots would have a different base, could that be what's causing the issues?
 
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