How to backup your configuration?

[Mazen97]

Hi everyone,

I used to run FreeNAS 0.7something until my motherboard was dead.

I got a new motherboard and used windows xp pro with raid 5 volum and everything was good until one of the drives died on me and I had to replace it with a larger one and then I found out that the utility used in win doesn't support raid upgrade until you destroy the array and create a new one.

I decided to get back to FreeNAS and found the new version. I can see it is totally new and I liked everything here but I'm missing one thing here. In the older version, we can backup the configuration as XML file and if something goes wrong you can reinstall FreeNAS and import the configuration and everything gets back.
In the new version I didn't find this option and I'm totally new to this version and I might missed ti somehow.

Just to explain why I'm asking for the backup option and please correct me if I'm wrong, that if you fresh install the OS and created the raid again or your zfs you will loose your data as it will delete every thing. It happened to me in the early days I was using the old FreeNAS. After sometime FreeNAS crashed and never worked until I formatted the ssd drive and reinstalled a fresh copy of FreeNAS and imported the configuration and I got every thing back.

Thanks

 

[Al562]

Hi Mazen97,

You'll find it on WebGUI page System|Settings|Config. See screenshot below:

correct me if I'm wrong, that if you fresh install the OS and created the raid again or your zfs you will loose your data as it will delete every thing.

This was not the case in earlier versions of FreeNAS and not in 8 either. If you know what to do, it is possible to recover or import your RAID/ZFS to a fresh system. To do this successfully there must be no damage to the drives/data, if your system crashed because it was hit by lightning, all bets are off. What you need to do depends on the original configuration.

Regards,
Al

 

[Mazen97]

Thanks for the quick reply