SOLVED Replication Question - snap mirror to remote server

[dudemanbacon]

Hello,

I have two FreeNAS servers at home and I want to use one (which has far less storage), solely as a DR/backup solution. I really only have two volumes right now. One for media and one for all of our family pictures and other important data, which is the only volume I need to mirror/snap-mirror to the other box.

Before upgrading both of them to 9.3, I set up "replication" between them and snapshot copies were being written to my secondary server, however it did not seem that the entire volume had been snap-mirrored initially and that it was ONLY copying snapshot data. If this is the case, and I lost my main server, I would never be able to restore from only snapshot data, which I believe is just pointers to the change from the original mirror. Am I wrong about that? Do I only need the snapshot copies (I don't know how a restore would be possible with just snapshot copies)? Or did I miss a step which replicates the entire volume to the remote server?

I am more familiar with NetApp Snap-Mirroring, in which the entire volume is snap-mirrored to the secondary filer and then scheduled snapshot copies of the change are mirrored after that.

Thank you in advance,

Nick

 

[SweetAndLow]

Works similar to netapp. The whole pool should get copied over the first time.

 

[dudemanbacon]

Works similar to netapp. The whole pool should get copied over the first time.

Thank you for the response. I completely looked over this in the documentation, at the end of the Replication steps:

"By default, replication occurs when snapshots occur. For example, if snapshots are scheduled for every 2 hours, replication occurs every 2 hours. The initial replication can take a significant period of time, from many hours to possibly days, as the structure of the entire ZFS pool needs to be recreated on the remote system. The actual time will depend upon the size of the pool and the speed of the network".

I've got it all configured, thanks again.

Nick