Migration from ZFSGuru

[Dennuis]

Hi everybody,

I'm currently running ZFSGuru at home on my HP N54L but since ZFSguru is some kind of end-of-life i would like to move to FreeNAS. I have a ZFS pool configured in ZFSGuru.
When i install FreeNAS, can i simply import the ZFS pool? Or will that delete/corrupt my data?

I hope someone knows how it's working!

Regards,
Dennis

 

[Ericloewe]

Theoretically, you should be able to normally import the pool. I don't know of anyone who's done that particular maneuver, though.

 

[Dennuis]

Theoretically, you should be able to normally import the pool. I don't know of anyone who's done that particular maneuver, though.

Sounds cool. I'm hoping it works and that someone can confirm this :D

 

[cyberjock]

You *can* just import the pool. It *should* work. Now here's where things get dicey. FreeNAS has expectations with how you create and store your pool on the disk. It expects to use GPT-IDs and use partition 2 with partition 1 being for swap. You also have the fact that different ZFS code does things differently, and they aren't always compatible despite the fact that they "should" work. So the general advice is if you are going to FreeNAS from something else you should recreate your pool in FreeNAS and move your data from the old server's pool to the new server via a network share or zfs replication.

There's plenty of people that have gone from NAS4Free and others like ZFSGuru that did an import and it worked great. Then one day their pool was corrupted and unmountable with no explanation as to what went wrong. So if you plan to do FreeNAS longterm and you want this stuff to "just work" in the future you're better off building a new system with a new pool and moving the data to the new pool vice reusing the pool.