Hello Everyone,
I am retiring my old Dell T3500 running FreeNAS Corral that has been my main server for the better part of the past year (using FreeNAS nightlies since probably December)
Because of limited hard drive bays, I was running out of storage and I didn’t have any redundancy–but I did have a separate server which I used SyncThing to backup my files to that had a RaidZ1…anyway off topic.
Syncthing used lots of memory and is slow… so thats not an option.
Now I am integrating everything into one box-- I bought a Dell R710, two L5640s, 96GB of RAM and some 4TB HGST NAS drives, a couple of 6TB drives for a backup…and of course the good old LSI 9211-8i.
I have my new server up and running after all my testing, and I started to copy files over SAMBA using my windows workstation as an intermediary. This transfer was going to take about 2 days at the rate it was transferring…so I searched for an alternative.
I tried to do some research on the best way to do this and I think I found the solution by using ZFS replication.
But I am confused as to how it works and where my files are.
So currently it is about half done after about 2 hours. Currently there is nothing showing up in my network drive mapped to this new server, but it is showing me that space is being used.
Is it simply the case that I will just restore the snapshot that was created on my other server and the files will just show up in the dataset I pointed it to (the same dataset as my SMB share) ? Currently it says there are no snapshots…
Am I using this tool wrong somehow?
I cant find anything in the documentation that really clarifies how or why or when to use replication… just how to set it up
Anyways, the tool is working. This might not have been the best tool for the job, but it's a valid choice, and I do not think it is worth your while to cancel this to try a different avenue. This will be way faster than SAMBA/CIFS with your machine in the middle.
What's going on is that ZFS will not allow you to work with a snapshot until the snapshot has been completely verified. Since you're moving an entirely new dataset over to the new FreeNAS box, all of that data from start to finish needs to come over before ZFS will let you see it and work with it. Depending on how much data you have in that dataset, this could take a while. But not seeing the data right away is normal based on what you've described.
For future reference, other transfer methods would include scp or NFS. But the nice thing about what you're doing here is that all of the snapshots your original FreeNAS box had will come over to the new FreeNAS box. So you're not having to build up your 2 weeks of snapshots (or however long you keep snapshots) from scratch.
So if all goes well when it is done it will have all of my data and my snapshots exactly how it is on the other server? In other words, since I am pointing the SMB share to the same dataset I am replicating to the files should just pop up when they are done, and then the snapshots will show up in the GUI as well?
Neat.
I'm just being impatient, waiting for things to arrive, things not getting delivered, 2 feet of snow... its been a rough few weeks..
Yeah replication is a pretty badass feature. As long as the SMB share is setup to point at where the data will be, and assuming all of the permissions are good (this is where I would go first if you have problems after the transfer), you'll be able to see all the things when it's done.
Might be permissions. Those files may have permissions set to some user and/or group ID that doesn't exist on your new FreeNAS box. I haven't used Corral yet, but in FreeNAS 9.10 there was a way to set permissions on the dataset via the GUI. If you can find that again, make sure that the permissions are set so that your user can log in, and apply the settings. If it's currently showing that your user should have access, revoke access (set it to root and wheel), set it, go back in, give yourself the access again, and set it. Make sure it's recursive.
Edit: Also, if you're up to it, you could also ssh in, preferably as root, and check to make sure that root can see the files. I imagine since the snapshots exist and can be seen in the WebUI, that all of the data is there safe and sound. But sometimes it's nice to verify that the files do indeed exist.
