Redundant boot drive

[chruk]

I have always considered it good practice to have redundancy on my boot drives. However I see from reading posts and the minimum requirements documentation that it seems to be recommended to just use a single drive for booting, even something like a usb stick.

My question is what are the consequences of the boot drive failing, do you lose settings that you may have spent time setting up? or are the settings automatically backed up software and able to be stored on a storage pool?

 

[elvisimprsntr]

Your risk depends highly on what type of media you are using for your boot-pool.

I believe the built-in config backups are stored on the boot-pool. It is a good idea to periodically backup your config, manually after changes or installing updates, or backup automatically.

Here is an example script I run as a weekly cron, which replicates using the GUI with export secret seed option.

Code:

#!/bin/sh

FILENAME="`hostname -s`-`cut -d' ' -f1 /etc/version`-`date +%Y%m%d`.tar"

#echo $FILENAME

tar -cvlf /mnt/data/Software/truenas/$FILENAME --strip-components=2 /data/freenas-v1.db /data/pwenc_secret

echo "Backup $FILENAME created"

find /mnt/data/Software/truenas/NAS-?-TrueNAS-*.tar -mtime +365 -exec rm {} \;

Make sure it has execute permissions

Code:

chmod a+x {filename}

Add to cron tasks

Code:

/bin/sh /mnt/data/Software/truenas/backup.sh

Obviously, this assumes you have a copy of the config file on another accessible system or media, which you should have if you are following the 3-2-1 backup strategy.

If your boot-pool fails, you can install TrueNAS on new media, restore config backup, and be back up and running in less than 10 minutes.