Creating partitions?

[WolfR1der]

We are trying to use FreeNAS to back up data on another storage device and want to create exact replicas of partitions that are on that other device. I've had to look up how to do this and find that the only way to do so is via command line. Not a problem, except:

'gpart show' doesn't list ada0
'gpart destroy ada0' results in "invalid argument"
'diskinfo -v ada0' DOES show info on ada0. But I can't seem to do anything with ada0 via any other

So I move on to a different drive (there are four total data drives). When I run 'gpart destroy' against any of the other drives I get "device busy".

How do I partition the drives? I can't find any real info on how to do this and overcome the errors I'm getting

 

[melloa]

You are probably approaching this non-ZFS way...

Provide system specs, vdevs, etc. and the folks here might be able to better help.

 

[WolfR1der]

Apologies, I'm a FreeNAS noob.

Xeon E-2174G
32GB RAM
1x Seagate Barracude 510 SSD (OS drive)
4x HGST 12TB/7200 (data drives)
1x 10GbE
2x 1GbE

Other than install the system and get it on the network I've not done much else.

 

[Redcoat]

What is the reason for the wish to have "exact replicas of partitions that are on that other device"?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Apologies, I'm a FreeNAS noob.

Xeon E-2174G
32GB RAM
1x Seagate Barracude 510 SSD (OS drive)
4x HGST 12TB/7200 (data drives)
1x 10GbE
2x 1GbE

Other than install the system and get it on the network I've not done much else.

Install the system is all you do. Then just use replication to move your data.

 

[WolfR1der]

What is the reason for the wish to have "exact replicas of partitions that are on that other device"?

Our devs want it for ease of restoring later. How they access the data now is how they want it if we have to resort to these backups. The FreeNAS server would be backup up data from Linux servers.

 

[Redcoat]

Could the objective not be achieved by creating FreeNAS datasets for each partition of the source and restoring the entire contents of a dataset?

 

[Yorick]

Exact partition replica is a function of backup software. Veeam is one example of software that does this really well. Those Veeam files can be stored on FreeNAS, of course.

Edit: If one wanted to be perverse, one could mount a FreeNAS datastore via SMB or NFS, and then dd the partition with an outfile on the mounted datastore. Really, though, use backup software. Particularly if these kind of questions are being asked, proper use of dd is probably a bridge too far.

If it's about files, and not partitions, one can rsync to a FreeNAS datastore. You could set up one datastore per partition, and rsync across on a regular basis.

 

[Redcoat]

Exact partition replica is a function of backup software. Veeam is one example of software that does this really well.

I can support that from my experience backing up all our Win10 machines daily to FreeNAS. No experience with Linux.