In my FreeNAS setup, my bootup media is a USB thumbdrive that plugs into a USB port (conveniently located directly on the motherboard, inside the case). I was greeted with the following email upon waking yesterday:
It was after researching are realizing the problem was with my thumbdrive that I realized that I did not have a configuration backup saved anywhere. After getting a new thumbdrive and installing FreeNAS on it, I had to rebuild everything. Thankfully, my two ZFS RAIDZ1 volumes were recovered without any lost data but I had several plugins setup. In some regards, it is good to start the process from scratch... correct mistakes I made before, but it took a lot of work setting up the plugin jails. When I re-installed FreeNAS, it took me to an install wizard and it got me thinking. It would be nice to have a process in FreeNAS that periodically saves a configuration backup and automatically uploads it to a cloud storage site, like Dropbox or Google Drive. Then, when installing FreeNAS, have one of the first options in the wizard to go to your cloud account and get one of the latest configuration backups. My current backup file is 323KB in size; that is relatively tiny! Transferring that small of a file to a cloud site would take very little time and takes very little space but it would save a TON of time and worry. I'm guessing there may be some way to hack up a solution for this if I got to the command-line and set up a cron job but this is something I think would be useful to many people, not just me.
The boot volume state is ONLINE: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
It was after researching are realizing the problem was with my thumbdrive that I realized that I did not have a configuration backup saved anywhere. After getting a new thumbdrive and installing FreeNAS on it, I had to rebuild everything. Thankfully, my two ZFS RAIDZ1 volumes were recovered without any lost data but I had several plugins setup. In some regards, it is good to start the process from scratch... correct mistakes I made before, but it took a lot of work setting up the plugin jails. When I re-installed FreeNAS, it took me to an install wizard and it got me thinking. It would be nice to have a process in FreeNAS that periodically saves a configuration backup and automatically uploads it to a cloud storage site, like Dropbox or Google Drive. Then, when installing FreeNAS, have one of the first options in the wizard to go to your cloud account and get one of the latest configuration backups. My current backup file is 323KB in size; that is relatively tiny! Transferring that small of a file to a cloud site would take very little time and takes very little space but it would save a TON of time and worry. I'm guessing there may be some way to hack up a solution for this if I got to the command-line and set up a cron job but this is something I think would be useful to many people, not just me.