ZFS replication from CORE to SCALE

[Whattteva]

I'm currently in the process of building out a second TrueNAS SCALE system to finally semi-retire my existing TrueNAS CORE.
I'm still going to be using the TrueNAS CORE system, but it would only be turned on once a month as a backup to the new primary one.

As I understand it, ZFS on Linux is incompatible with FreeBSD prior to version 13.0-RELEASE and is also the reason why the FreeBSD project is currently supporting both FreeBSD 12 and 13.

My question is, would I still be able to do a ZFS send/receive from the SCALE to the CORE system even though the CORE system is running earlier version of ZFS (I have not upgraded my pool since version 11) or would I have to first upgrade the pool to the latest version to match the new SCALE's system? Note that the only ZFS feature I use is the basic (lz4) compression and checksums. No encryptions or dedups, etc.

Hardware specs for the systems are in my signature.

 

[winnielinnie]

I believe ZFS is backwards compatible, when it comes to send/recv. There might be exceptions to this, such as "large recordsize".

If you plan to keep your Core ZFS pool as an occasional backup target, then perhaps you can "upgrade" the ZFS features on this pool, to ensure it can receive replications from the SCALE server?

I haven't tried this myself, so maybe someone more well versed can answer this more definitively.

 

[Whattteva]

Thanks for the reply.

If you plan to keep your Core ZFS pool as an occasional backup target, then perhaps you can "upgrade" the ZFS features on this pool, to ensure it can receive replications from the SCALE server?

I could upgrade it, but was looking to make that a last resort since I do run other FreeBSD systems here and I'd like to have that backward compatibility just in case since upgrading the ZFS features is a one-way road if I understand it correctly?

 

[winnielinnie]

upgrading the ZFS features is a one-way road if I understand it correctly?

It is, and it's wise to forgo "upgrades" to a ZFS pool's feature unless you know for sure you'll never need compatibility to go in the other direction.