Importing and Raid ?

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bujums

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Hi, I am re-doing my server after a disaster. My last FreeNAS system had 2 drives as UFS and Raid 1 (software). Very, Very difficult to recover the data on those disks after a power failure. So I have two questions as I plan on rebuilding.
1 -- if I format those disks as EXT2 or NTFS in import the volumes, which one will be easier to recover data from in the event of a disaster and what other advantages or disadvantages will I have?
2 -- I can do a hardware Raid 1 but will FreeNAS see that as one drive or two?

Thanks
 

bujums

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okay, did some reading and see some features of EXT2 and NTFS so no need to list advantages... just need some oppinions about what would be easier to recover data from.

Thanks
 

ProtoSD

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Ext2 & NTFS support on FreeNAS is limited and only intended to be used to import data to one of the FreeNAS native filesystems UFS or ZFS. Of those 2 UFS would be easier to recover data from.

If you do hardware raid, FreeNAS will only see 1 disk.
 

bujums

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okay so the Ext2 and NTFS importing is just temporary... wow, I am not sure what to do now. It took two of us 15 hours to get data of the UFS disks. I though I could avoid that and use one of the others and be able to accesses from any linux system. Is there any documentation on recovery data form UFS disks out there?
 

survive

Behold the Wumpus
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Hi bujums,

Any reason you don't invest in a UPS?

-Will
 

bujums

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Sep 20, 2011
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I have one for it now and I will make sure that it is configured to shut down the server open battery usage...
 

louisk

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Hi, I am re-doing my server after a disaster. My last FreeNAS system had 2 drives as UFS and Raid 1 (software). Very, Very difficult to recover the data on those disks after a power failure. So I have two questions as I plan on rebuilding.
1 -- if I format those disks as EXT2 or NTFS in import the volumes, which one will be easier to recover data from in the event of a disaster and what other advantages or disadvantages will I have?
2 -- I can do a hardware Raid 1 but will FreeNAS see that as one drive or two?

Thanks

If the goal is to simply recover from a power outage, ZFS will remain consistent even with a power outage. I've pulled the plug on many ZFS (both Solaris and FreeBSD (all the way back to 7.0R) systems) and I never had issues with data inconsistency.

That said, I would strongly suggest you setup a UPS with sufficient time on it to run your FreeNAS server and allow you to gracefully power down (depending on what you choose, you may have options to do this automagically with the UPS service that already exists).
 

bujums

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Sep 20, 2011
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The UPS will be set up for next time around with an automatic shut down for sure... I only able to use the UFS with my hardware and ZFS was not an option according to everything I read. Thanks for all the great information. I think all my questions are answered now. I just need to figure out if I should change my system completely or do the same thing with a better UPS set up than last time.
 
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