removing part of storage.

[bpherbst]

I'm fairly new to FreeNAS. I have three 8 tb hard drives. Can I remove one, put the removed one in a windows pc, format and copy the storage on the FreeNAS drives to the windows drive? (obviously I can't copy more than the single hard drive can hold) I've never dealt with a failed hard drive or in my case removing a hard drive intentionally.

 

[Jailer]

How is your pool configured?

 

[bpherbst]

RAIDZ1

 

[danb35]

In theory, yes, you can do what you're asking about. Once you finish copying the data onto your pool, you then replace the missing disk with the disk you used to transfer the data. But if there's any kind of data or disk error while restoring that disk into your pool, all your data is lost.

 

[bpherbst]

Thank you guys for responding. From what I gathered and to confirm; the data is safe copying the files to my backup HD on my windows system but it is not as safe when I add another drive to restore the ZFS FreeNAS pool. So the first backup should be good but in case I may have to recreate a FreeNAS pool and recopy those files over to the FreeNAS pool.

people may wonder why don't I just buy another drive but I am remotely and I need the files on a Windows platform.