Importing HDs

[Andrea]

Hi everybody,

I'm a new user of FreeNAS. I have just downloaded the last (stable) version from freenas.org and I installed it on a USB key.
In my new NAS there are 6 HDs with lots of data inside (that I cannot erase).
I think that these HDs are formatted with EXT3 (or maybe EXT4).

How can I import them in my new FreeNAS? I have seen that there is only EXT2fs :(

Please help me :(

 

[dlavigne]

You can't. You'll have to copy the data elsewhere, reformat the disks, then copy the data back.

 

[Andrea]

You can't. You'll have to copy the data elsewhere, reformat the disks, then copy the data back.

Ok. Thank you. I'll update the status of the question as "fixed"; but can you help me just with my "curiosity"?? Why FreeNAS is not compatible with etx4?? I mean... It should be one of the state of the art fs right now, right? What is the reason behind this choice?

 

[DrKK]

Ok. Thank you. I'll update the status of the question as "fixed"; but can you help me just with my "curiosity"?? Why FreeNAS is not compatible with etx4?? I mean... It should be one of the state of the art fs right now, right? What is the reason behind this choice?

EXT4 is not a particularly well-regarded filesystem in some circles. Theodore Tso, the guy did a lot of the work on ext3 and ext4, even says that he thinks ext4 is kind of a piece of shit (I'm paraphrasing). I am sure there are also technical and other reasons that contribute to lack of interest in that filesystem.

I took the liberty of a little Googling, and I see there might be some utilities out there that might downconvert your ext4fs to something like ext3fs. But that sounds risky/scary to me, and you should exercise considerable caution.

By the way, even though EXT4 you're screwed, it is well-known that EXT3 can be semi-compatible with EXT2, and there's a good chance you might be able to import that filesystem. You'd have to exercise some Google-fu though. (You said you weren't sure if you were formatted 3 or 4---3 looks like it will be considerably less problem).

 

[dlavigne]

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD which provides built-in support for ext2fs. That driver provides very limited support for ext3 (no journalling, extended attributes, or inodes greater than 128-bytes).

 

[Andrea]

Unfortunately I figured out that it was EXT4. Now I'm trying to follow the solution of dlavigne but copying more than 1TB into external 3.5HD is quite slow :(

Anyway... I found the tools to convert from EXT4 to 3 as well but I agree with your opinion of "risky/scary" solution so I avoided to do that (especially because I have some important file into that hds).

Just a few more questions:
1) Once I have the hd empty do suggest me to format it into UFS or ZFS??? note: These HD will NOT be configured as RAID or something like this but only as single HD!
2) In case I choose ZFS this fs are going to be well supported in the future (also from non-BSD distribution??). I would like to avoid this problem again :P

Thank you a lot for your availability :)

 

[Dusan]

Ok. Thank you. I'll update the status of the question as "fixed"; but can you help me just with my "curiosity"?? Why FreeNAS is not compatible with etx4?? I mean... It should be one of the state of the art fs right now, right? What is the reason behind this choice?

Another reason is that ext4 is a Linux file system. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD. Speaking about state-of-art in filesystems, ZFS is actually the current state-of-art FS, in the Linux world the experimental Btrfs is trying to get there, ext4 is just a stop-gap solution based on old technology.

By the way, even though EXT4 you're screwed, it is well-known that EXT3 can be semi-compatible with EXT2, and there's a good chance you might be able to import that filesystem. You'd have to exercise some Google-fu though. (You said you weren't sure if you were formatted 3 or 4---3 looks like it will be considerably less problem).

In FreeBSD there's http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/fusefs-ext4fusem, however it is not included in FreeNAS.