FreeNAS 9.3 and UFS mounting support?

[Deonast]

I was about to upgrade to FreeNAS 9.3 when I noticed in the documentation caveats
"UFS is no longer supported. If your data currently resides on one UFS-formatted disk, you will need to create a ZFS volume using other disk(s) after the upgrade, then use the instructions in Import Disk to mount the UFS-formatted disk in order to copy the data to the ZFS volume"

So if I read that correctly three will be no support to boot from or use for the storage array UFS. I'm assuming if you can use an Import Disk function that support is still there to mount a UFS volume.

My question is, is that still read / write support for mounting UFS and will that remain in future releases in the 9.3 and beyond that branch.

I ask as my current use case is that I connect drives directly to the system in UFS format for backup purposes, and I then rsync data from the zfs storage array to those backup drives (takes a few backup disks to do it all). For my purposes that gets me the best speed of backups.

So as you see it all depends on if UFS support remains with read / write capability. I had tried in the past with ext2 and ended up with corruption on my backup discs, while UFS worked fine. So I don't want to lose that.

If anyone can shed some light on the road map for UFS support that would be great.

 

[Ericloewe]

UFS is only supported for importing data from existing drives. Nothing more.

 

[Deonast]

UFS is only supported for importing data from existing drives. Nothing more.

Damn looks like I need to find another distro or stick to an ever growing stale 9.2 branch.
Shame really it took a fair bit of mucking around to get it working and stable as I run it all as a virtual machine on an esxi 5.5 host server with raw disks mounted on to the VM for the zfs pool. Vmware had taken away a lot of hardware support since previous versions. Well I used to use SUSE and XFS and a raid card may have to just go back to that.

So does this distro now only support ZFS and that's it? Seems a bit limiting. Just out of interest how do others backup a large ZFS pool of data?

 

[Ericloewe]

Damn looks like I need to find another distro or stick to an ever growing stale 9.2 branch.
Shame really it took a fair bit of mucking around to get it working and stable as I run it all as a virtual machine on an esxi 5.5 host server with raw disks mounted on to the VM for the zfs pool. Vmware had taken away a lot of hardware support since previous versions. Well I used to use SUSE and ZFS and a raid card may have to just go back to that.

So does this distro now only support ZFS and that's it? Seems a bit limiting. Just out of interest how do others backup a large ZFS pool of data?

ZFS replication or Rsync.

 

[Deonast]

ZFS replication or Rsync.

Hmm already takes a good number of hours with direct drives and rsync which my slow network would take forever to robocopy to my windows machine and onto an attached drive to do my backups. ZFS replication is out as I want my backups off site. I'd have no where to put a secondary server off site and it would kill my crappy (Australian) bandwidth even if I did.

So feels like FreeNAS is really only useful it you have a dedicated backup host you can rsync to which can then backup to physical media. In my view if you don't have backups you can archive off site you don't have anything. Murphy's law I guess, when I think I have my backups covered murphy finds a way give me a kick.

 

[Herman Eggink]

Same issue here: I use(d) an external (esata) 3T NTFS formatted drive with crashplan to do backups to find that I could not mount the disk as I did under 9.2. Ended up manually mounting it. Downside is that I now have to enter a shell to do a backup :-(. Anyways, it works (I think).

 

[JanoKid023]

Good day,
I have almost the same issue. I had an old FreeNas OS and the pendrive what I was using had issues also, so I decided to buy a new pendrive and re-install the OS. In the old OS I used to have one 2TB HDD with UFS foormat. I use this NAS for playing and streaming videos mostly. Now i have the new 9.10 OS and I cant add the hard drive to it. If I want to add it as a new valume or drive the OS wants to wipe it. Can I add this drive without losing the data ? If yes how ? Thank you for the help.

 

[Ericloewe]

UFS is only supported for importing data from existing drives. Nothing more.

 

[JanoKid023]

Thanks, i understand that. But what is the solution?

 

[danb35]

Use Import Disk from the web GUI to bring in the disk, copy all its data into your pool, and then unmount it. You will not be able to keep that disk mounted or use it for storage with FreeNAS 9.3+.

 

[JanoKid023]

Use Import Disk from the web GUI to bring in the disk, copy all its data into your pool, and then unmount it. You will not be able to keep that disk mounted or use it for storage with FreeNAS 9.3+.

Oke, and what should I add as Destination: ? It is asking for Volume and database.

Which version of NAS is supporting this filesystem ? Maybe I can use that not the new one.

 

[danb35]

It's asking for a dataset, not a database. You need to have a ZFS volume already created. That's where the data will be copied to. FreeNAS 9.3+ will not let you just use your existing UFS volume the way you did on 9.2.x or earlier.

 

[JanoKid023]

It's asking for a dataset, not a database. You need to have a ZFS volume already created. That's where the data will be copied to. FreeNAS 9.3+ will not let you just use your existing UFS volume the way you did on 9.2.x or earlier.

I cant add a ZFS volume as I have only one HDD in the server.

 

[danb35]

Then you will need to either add a disk, reformat your existing disk, back up your data somewhere else, or not use FreeNAS 9.3+.

 

[JanoKid023]

Then you will need to either add a disk, reformat your existing disk, back up your data somewhere else, or not use FreeNAS 9.3+.

I understand, thank you.