Backup & restore options after new VDev

[Wade]

Hello all,

My freenas box is 5x2gb hard drives in RAIDz2. My total space is 5.8tb. Today I purchased a 6th drive (2tb). After reading Cyber's noob guide, I understand that I cant add this drive to the existing VDev. With that in mind my attention is pointed to rebuilding my server =( Copying my data off the server is not that big of a deal. What bothers me is all of the hours of configuration and research that I put in, getting all my plugins and jails to be fine tuned, stable and efficient. I am aware of the save config button and that's fine and handy for the gui settings. Please tell me there is some snap shot trick or some way to back up my folder structure, plugins and jails. Now that I think about it, even if I was able to backup my file structure, when it came time to copy it all back wonder if there would be a permissions circus?

Also, just out of curiosity, why does the freenas gui under storage, zfs manager, it has an option for extending my volume?

I really don't want to rebuild, my server is running like a champ. Any options at all for adding this last drive?

Thank you

 

[danb35]

You cannot add a disk to a vdev. You can, however, add one or more disks, in a new vdev, to an existing pool. Thus, you can add your new drive to your existing pool. DON'T DO THIS. The pitfall is that now you'll have a single drive striped with a RAIDZ2 vdev. When that one drive fails, you lose everything on your pool.

The intended use of the "extend" field would be if you had, say, four or six new drives and wanted to extend your pool with another RAIDZ2 vdev.

Yes, there is a snapshot way to back up your data--it's the ZFS replication process. You'll need another ZFS volume somewhere to support it, either on the same or a different machine.

 

[Wade]

Thank you dan, im going to rebuild from scratch, currently backing up all plugin configurations and moving files off the server.

My question is, can I use my current gui backup that has a 5 drive vdev for my new setup of a 6 drive vdev?

 

[Maverick]

You can copy off all your normal shares. The only ones that I would recommend replicating to another drive (if you have one), is the jails. Then when you rebuild with your 6 drives, replicate the jails back. Dusan has a few terminal lines for shifting the jails around if you search for it.