FN 11.2-B3 iocage jail size and backups

[feleven]

FreeNAS 11.2-Beta3, Plex installed as standard jail (iocage dataset separate from FreeNAS dataset on primary pool), primary pool created from RZ2 4 x 4TB WD Red drives, backup pool created from striped 2 x 6TB WD Red drives.

Yes, I know my backup pool is at risk of a failure, but its one of several media backups, so if it goes south on me, its a PITA but I won't lose anything but some more hair and a few hours of resilvering.

Anyway - I've been running Plex as a plugin jail for several years, starting around FN 9.x, without many issues. I was always able to backup the primary pool / dataset, including the plugin jail, to the backup pool using a cron task to run rsync. Because the plugins were inside the primary dataset, the backup command was just one line (FN-RZ2 primary, FN-BK backup):

<rsync -avz /mnt/FN-RZ2/ /mnt/FN-BK>

Now that I've moved to iocage jails, doing the above backup command doesn't capture the iocage Plex jail dataset. So I created a similar but separate rsync command for the iocage dataset and let it run to create the initial backup. It took forever (not sure why, drives are all connected by SATA3 interfaces), but when done it appeared to be a pretty small set of files, which makes sense.

Since the iocage jail isn't much more than a stripped down FN virtual machine with a bunch of pointers into the primary pool Media folder, I'm wondering if I really have to worry much about backing it up? If I had to restore the primary pool, I'd get all my media back, which is the most important thing. Then I could just re-create the iocage jail from scratch, as it didn't seem to take that long. Am I missing something important about the iocage dataset that would make backing it up a requirement? It occurs to me I could just backup the iocage configuration file (whereever that's located) and forget the rest?

One thing I noticed when creating the iocage dataset: it appears to have taken roughly half the total available RZ2 drive space, based on looking at the Storage/Pools display. If I'm understanding what I'm seeing correctly, that's a huge waste - the iocage only consumed about 5GB of space but grabbed almost 5.5TB from the FN primary pool. Was there a setting I should have used to limit how much of the original pool iocage commandeered?

My apologies for the newb questions - this is the first time I've ventured this deep into FreeNAS and jails.

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to decide upon a solution for this?

 

[feleven]

Were you able to decide upon a solution for this?

No responses from the forum after a whole week - not sure if that's because I didn't include enough info, misused terms badly, nobody else is experiencing the same issues, or what ... rather discouraging ... the experienced users here generally recommend moving away from plugins and using native programs in iocage jails instead (especially for Plex, where plugin updates significantly lag native program updates). When I upgraded to FN 11.2 B3, I decided their recommendation was a better long term solution. So I expected to get some response to my post, even if it was being chided for not reading some documentation I haven't yet found. Perhaps my issues are one-off and nobody else sees them. I dunno.

For now I continue to backup both datasets each night using the cron rsync job, but I still don't understand enough about the new jail system to know if the iocage backup really provides a worthwhile benefit. The media files are what matter and they're backed up with the primary FN dataset.

As for the 5.5TB that the iocage dataset grabbed from the primary pool, I'm clueless ... I don't know if that disk space is subsequently unavailable to the primary pool, or if its just "pencilled in" for potential iocage use. I've gone back over the configuration steps I followed to set up the iocage jail, as well as all the 11.2 B3 docs I can find, without learning anything new. I just can't accept that iocage unilaterally grabs half of the pool available disk space when its first initialized without a configuration setting to throttle it - that's not what I'm used to in the FreeNAS universe.

I'm still open to suggestions, or even questions, if they move me to a better understanding. If there's some other forum you think I should post in to get responses, I'm all ears :) .

Thanks for checking up on me!