What's the process to move a zpool to another server?

[Sam Alexander]

I'm planning a new FreeNAS installation for my home, and the one question I wasn't quite sure about is if my hardware fails how can I move my drives to another machine and recover my data. I'm using an older system I built years ago, but I plan on buying new 1-2TB drives to build the pool, probably 2 drives mirrored for now.

My question, if this system fails what's the process to pull data from these drives? If I built a new FreeNAS system on a new box could I connect these drives and rebuild the RAID or even just mount one of the drives and pull data from it? Also given it's ZFS could I mount one of the drives on OSX or Linux and easily pull data from it? And how complicated would this be if I used encryption?

I tried to find some HowTo's that covered this or other posts, but none I found seemed to answer these very well. Also I plan on doing some testing using FreeNAS in VirtualBox since I really want to have this process down before I start using FreeNAS to store all of our stuff.

Thanks for any advise.

 

[ser_rhaegar]

You can pull both drives and plug them into another system running FreeNAS of the same version or newer. An older version may not import them if the older version doesn't support the same ZFS features/version of your pool.

Once hooked up, you use the AutoImport button in the storage tab.

Keep in mind, if the drives are encrypted you will need the encryption key and passphrase / recovery encryption key.

You can test all this in VirtualBox by moving the virtual drives to another VM with FreeNAS.