Hi,
so I have a problem, about some time ago I recommend to my parents (Both computer scientist) they should run a freenas box for saving important data. Everything was fine for some time until i looked at it last week and they apparently took the never touch a running system too literally.
anyway a new box is build and and up and running but how to best transfer the data. The pool ins’t recognized by the new System and i even tried to go up incrementally by the only Freenas version that recognizes the pool is the old one. I din’t try updating that one out of fear that after that one I have zero operating systems left that would see the pool.
my next idea was to copy the data via Share but after 2h off copping 10GB of data I ended that. The old hardware is not only slow but also really full so performance is s#*t.
So my question is there any ‘trick’ that is recommended?
Tl:dr: How to copy data from Freenas 8.3 to new Freenas box in a "fast"isch way?
uhh cool feature! I will look into it 
When you say the system didn’t recognise the pool, do you mean it could see it, but would not import it? or it did not identify Any pools with Zpool import?
Or it didn’t automatically “just load” them, in which case, you might have been able to import them using the in built gui?
(just be careful to read what the gui actually says, because if can be confusing as to whether it will Import an existing pool, or create a pool with existing disks)
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Yeah that’s why I told him to look at send because he’s 3 major versions behind so if the old system still turns on it will be easier to just pipe the data to a new modern install instead of having to fuck with a bunch of settings.
But would need the pool to be imported, even if read only to send from old pool to new pool?
It’s been quite a while since I touched FreeNas, and from what I remember, it didn’t have a read only import on the GUI, but I could on the CLI
No, send is different from importing.
It’s kinda like netcat (IIRC).
oh, I thought you meant zfs send
as in zfs send tank@weekly-today | zfs receive tank2
which would need the sending system to be able to have the pool active.
If OP can have the pool active, why not physically transplant the drives to the new system, import the pool (maybe read only, or whatever) then send from old (imported) pool, to receive on new pool?
But I guess now you mean getting the old box back up and running on the older version, 8.3, and doing a send from old box, and receive it to the pool on the new system.
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Yeah that’s how it made sense in mind mind.
But there’s definitely more than one way to do this.
I am still new to all this.
I poke and prod my nose where it has no business, and see if I can slowly learn from what I stir up.
I like the books by Lucas and Jude*, but I just don’t need to do much, so knowledge is spotty.
*The boot notes are especially good, and the BSD bias doesn’t show too much…