Temporary backup of a jail while I setup things better

[bitsandnumbers]

Hi, I'm using freenas for a while now, but in the beginning I did a rough setup and was happy with it. Although now I want to put my jails HDD in RAID to have a solid backup solution.

So since I'm going to erase the jails HDD to setup the RAID, I want my data to be placed somewhere safe while I'm doing the operation. I didn't look very closely as what my options are, but I think I have options like "dump", tar'ing, replications etc…

Basically, I just need my data and modified config files to be placed on another disk in my server. No remote thing, just another of my server's HDD while I setup things.

So I rely on you to help me find the best solution. Something that assure me that my data will be back to normal once everything is done.

 

[anodos]

Not sure what you mean by 'RAID'. Don't do hardware raid. You might want to read through the FreeNAS handbook. If all you want to do is export your jails, refer to the warden command line tools.
http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Warden®/9.2#Managing_Jails_from_the_Command_Line

 

[bitsandnumbers]

No, I'd like to do a software RAID. I know of the limitations of an hardware one. I indeed want to export my jails, as they are, to import them later on. The warden seems like I'd want to use, I'll check on this and try to learn how to use it, thanks :)

If you know of some place where's there some how-to's for the warden tool, or if there's some "easy" way to install the GUI on freenas, I'd appreciate it :)

Thanks for your answer.

 

[cyberjock]

Be warned that using warden from the command line may totally screw up FreeNAS' config file. The reason is that the "stuff" you do from the CLI doesn't "apply" to the config file. So if you delete or change a jail from warden, on reboot FreeNAS config will expect things to not have changed. If you've changed it you're going to have a pissed off OS that's going to start having problems. And at that point your option is to wipe out your configuration and start over.

If this is too limiting you should consider going with FreeBSD. ;)

 

[bitsandnumbers]

If this is too limiting you should consider going with FreeBSD. ;)

What do you mean ? Using freeBSD tools ? At first, I was thinking of sth that could backup my freeBSD jails, so that when I create new jails in freeNAS I could just restore my old jails in the new ones. I'm not sure I'll be able to deal with the issues that come with warden tool messing up freeNAS config. But the thing is, I don't know what's the best freeBSD tool to do my backups. I was considering "dump", but it gave me an error :

Code:

Unknown filesystem

, and from there I don't know what to do… I also considered TAR, but each time I tried it, even with "exclude" parameter, it ended up in a loop because it stubbornly wanted to compress some root folders, even though I told it not to. I was considering rsync, but I would need to include some exclude parameters also and didn't yet bother to look at the doc to do so. I'm still looking for good advices on this situation :)