Replication finishes immediately and are only a few KBs

eccevery

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 24, 2014
Messages
42
So I've been fiddling around with my storage and seem to have made a mess of it, hope you can help me straight this out. I have a personal storage server that earlier run FreeNAS 11.2 for a long time. A few days back I upgraded first to 11.3 and then to TrueNAS 12.0. I have a few datasets on the server and back those up to another server, who has the same version history and upgrades as the primary server (that is, right now they both use TrueNAS 12.0). This backup is setup "the usual way" that I see on most guides and videos, by pushing data to backup server via SSH.

I noticed that my replication jobs failed after upgrading. I cant say for sure if I did something to break it... I probably did. I'm not really interested in why this broke in the first place, I'd just like to get backups going again.

I set up new replication jobs, I noticed it was a bit different in TrueNAS where you don't have to copy/paste replication tokens and stuff. The first error message I got was this:

Code:
Target dataset 'tank1' does not have snapshots but has data (e.g. 'videos' and replication from scratch is not allowed. Refusing to overwrite existing data.


"tank1" is the dataset on the target server. So I started investigating and trying out various changes, most of them resulting in the same error message.

Code:
cannot unmount '/var/db/system/syslog-1c36823397d74dbc9e7d4fbefe8b455e': umount failed.

The message above was solved by moving the System Dataset. I've never seen that error message earlier on FreeNAS, but it was one that showed up while I tried to get replication going.

Finally I figured it would be easier to just make a completely new backup. I completely wiped the backup server and created a new dataset on it, called "tank2". Then I deleted all snapshots on the main server and created a new replication job. Here's the problem: The replication job runs fine but copies around 90-100k of data, while the dataset contains around 1.3TB. I guess the snapshot does not see any difference from the last time it ran or something like that. How do I reset this and force it to ignore all previous snapshots and do a replication like it was the first time?

I've tried various settings in the replication job, like Synchronize Destination Snapshots With Source, that I figured would allow a more "forced" way of replication regardless of snapshot status. It does not however seem to help. The snapshot created when I start the replication job says USED: 56k, REFERENCED: 88k. I don't get it. When I look in Storage > Pools it says the dataset has 1.4 TB used.

I'll post the hardware specs if needed, but it does not feel like a hardware issue, more like me doing something wrong here. Both servers are supermicro X9 based, ECC memory and WD red disks... I think I've done this by the books.

Thanks!
 
Last edited:

Nick2253

Wizard
Joined
Apr 21, 2014
Messages
1,633
I ran into a similar issue, where the replication task on 12 would not allow me to "continue" on top of my existing data, and I solved it by deleting the dataset on my backup server, and recreating the replication task.

I also found that "pulling" the data works much more reliably than "pushing" the data.

My advice is to delete and recreate the backup on the destination server, and then create the replication task there.
 

eccevery

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 24, 2014
Messages
42
I ran into a similar issue, where the replication task on 12 would not allow me to "continue" on top of my existing data, and I solved it by deleting the dataset on my backup server, and recreating the replication task.

I also found that "pulling" the data works much more reliably than "pushing" the data.

My advice is to delete and recreate the backup on the destination server, and then create the replication task there.

Thanks for the reply. I tried pulling replication from backup server also, but it does not work either. It finishes the replication in a millisecond and not a single file is copied.
 

eccevery

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 24, 2014
Messages
42
I never got this working. So I created a new pool and dataset on a new temporary disk and copied all files onto that, and then replicated those datasets to the target server.
 
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