CD/DVD/BR Burning in FreeNAS?

[ArmyManNB]

I have a 4 bay FreeNAS from XI. I have a blue ray burner with some 50 GB disks. Is there anyway to use a web interface/jail/CLI GUI like MC etc so I could archive some of my data without having to re transfer it back to windows?

 

[Artion]

Well, AFAIK no. You have to transfer your data from the network to a BD burning system, Windows or Linux. Even external USB drives (USB 2.0 or 3.0) are not directly supported for backup purposes.
In FreeBSD, the heart of FreeNAS, there are tools to burn ISOs to CD/DVD/BD, but you have to create the ISO and then burn it to the disc. Also you can not add packages to the FN system but only in jails, and then burn from it by mounting the datasets you want to backup, but it's not what you want, to complicated :D, and maybe not supported at all.

 

[nightshade00013]

Could you make it work on the FreeNAS.... Probably but you would have to create a VM and pass through the drive so that the VM can read/write to it. Even then you could just be burning nice little BluRay coasters. I wouldn't even want to start messing with the jails since they would not really be able to access the drive directly.

If I was going to attempt something like this I would probably either virtualize FreeNAS and some other OS I wanted to work with side by side then make the backups from the Windows or Linux VM so everything was using a super fast internal link between the VM's. Or install a 10GB or faster connection in FreeNAS and desktop computer and then install the burner in my Desktop.

 

[Artion]

you would have to create a VM and pass through the drive so that the VM can read/write to it...

Yes, I think so too, but VMs can't access datasets directly unless you mount them as a network share... so you use a VM just as an external physical machine... Maybe the only way is:

install the burner in my Desktop

 

[Arwen]

I do backups of my critical data occasionally to burnable CD, DVD or Blu-ray. It's all done from my client, (using Linux tools, like DAR-Disk Archiver).
As others have said, burning discs from FreeNAS is not currently supported.