Freenas mount HDD to copy data from pool

[Frank Jeagar]

Hi all!

I'm currently giving my NAS a much needed upgrade and I am now thinking about how I should backup my ZFS pool. I'm obviously not a Freenas veteran, so please feel free to point out if this idea is foolish altogether, just be gentle with it

Basically my plan was to get a single, large HDD, slap it into a hot swap bay, mount it and either copy my data or snapshot the pool.

Honestly I haven't got that far yet because I am, to my surprise, struggling with the initial step of mounting a drive for data transfer. I mount it via the GUI to a directory I created within mnt, but then in the shell I can't see any of the data on the mounted drive. Copying data to the location simply saves it to that directory on my boot drive, not the mounted drive.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Donnie Fisher]

I'm planning on going down the route of a ZFS based NAS setup, starting with smaller disks to learn a linux server build. Its my plan to build a simple(ish) pool based on mirrored pairs. So for a 4Gb space i would have [ 2+2 mirror] + [ 2+2 mirror ] = 4tb. When it comes to wanting to upgrade the space further down the line, I would take a drive a time, pull it out, swap in the bigger one, let it rebuild and repeat, until each pair had increased, leading to a bigger overall space but using the same number of drives in total.

[2+2]+[2+2] = 4
[2+2]+[2+4] = 4 < 1st drive swapped in and rebuilt ... no change in total space
[2+2]+[4+4] = 6 < both drives in pool changed, bigger space now that both disks in the mirror are larger.

[2+4]+[4+4] = 6
[4+4]+[4+4] = 8

That way, the data remains spread across the disks, rather than taking all the data and putting on 1 single disk for it to get wrong.

Is that a sort of upgrade path that would suit you ?

 

[montymint]

that's the current plan I'm doing now. I've purchased a 4TB external drive to back the media from the pool. I'm then installing 2 fresh 4TB reds in a mirrored raid. Then will add 2 x whatever when I hit the limit.