upgrade from 7 non zfs to 8 without losing data

[maul]

i have far too much data stored to be able to take it all out and start afresh
i would dearly love a way of upgrading without losing all my data
we are talking about several tb here on 5 disks including 2 raid mirror for vip data

edit would it be possible to add another drive with zfs and copy over to that then reformat old drive to zfs and repeat until i got all on zfs then upgrade ?
currently trying to research zfs to work it out but any help would be great to point me in right direction thanks :)

 

[louisk]

If several is around 2, then the easiest way would be to buy a 2T usb disk and dump your data to it.

When you use ZFS, you need to create vdevs with some level of redundancy if your data is important. You can have a pool with multiple vdevs. For example, you could have mirrors (RAID1), RAIDZ (RAID5), or RAIDZ2 (RAID6). Best practice is to use a power of 2 for your spindle count per vdev (such as 2, 4, 8, don't go above 8).

As you are probably already aware, there is no official upgrade path from 7 to 8, hence my first comment.

 

[maul]

sounds like a good idea
i also found out i can use ufs still on 8 so hopefully just the raid drives to back up unless i missed something?
wont be upgrading for a while yet as i need bigger cf card for system and more memory
also if it aint broke ..
i cant see what extra i would get from upgrade at the moment and GF will kill me if it stops working and i lose any data :P

8 seems to be getting better all the time so i will keep an eye on it and jump when it gives me even more functionality that i didn't know i needed
thanks for your help louisk

 

[louisk]

Considering the GF factor, I would suggest that you (over time) build a new replacement system and copy (not move) data from one to another. This will be a good test to make sure things work, as well as allow you to setup the new machine and make sure things work properly w/o losing the old one. I would probably suggest cron and rsync to keep the data in sync. Note that this is not replication, but simple copying from one to another. If you make changes to the data on the new system, it would get overwritten by the old data. Still useful for testing.