ZFS volume and plugin quesion

[mefreema]

I just setup my first freenas box. I have two mirrored 1Tb drives to backup all my data to. I have two 250gb drive in a strip that I inteneded on putting non critical data on to just stream TV show from and whatever.

I installed two plugins, plex and minidnla, and noticed that they are installing to the striped volume. I am now concerned that if my striped volume fails I loose all my plugin data.

My question is can i convert my striped volume to a mirror and preserve the plugin data that is there so far? Can I move the plug in data to the mirrored volume? Should i just delete the volume and recreate and a mirror then reinstall the plugins from scratch? I guess what is the best way of going about this? I am ok with loosing the size on the stripe by converting to a mirror.

 

[cyberjock]

Your terminology is wrong and could lead to miscommunication. Assuming you meant to say you have a zpool of 2 disks in striped vdevs you can take each disk and make a mirror of it from the CLI. You'd need 2 more disks and you wouldn't gain any more disk space. You can't do this from the GUI. If you search the forums there's been a bunch of people that have asked how to do this lately, so there's plenty of instructions for how to do it if you look around.

 

[mefreema]

I dont have any more free sata ports so adding extra disk is not an option at this point. After poking around a little bit I think I am have come up with another solution. Can I move my jail root to the other "zpool" that is mirrored? Then I can just leave it there or redo my striped zpool as a mirrored one and then move it back. So will moving the root of your jail mess it up if you already have plugins configured? Hope that makes sense, because as you know I am a NOOb. btw thank you very much for the reply :)

 

[cyberjock]

Someone tried to move their jail within the last week. All hell broke lose because the FreeNAS configuration was expecting the jail to be in the old location. Even after multiple manual database edits he gave up as it still didn't work.

If you can't add the 2 disks to make a mirror I'd say you should just move your jail and redo the setup. :(

 

[mefreema]

When you say redo the setup, do you mean just the jail/plugins or the whole freenas setup? I am guilty of not reading more upfront and not coming to you with better questions. After searching and reading more post it sounds like a may not want to move my jail to the mirror zpool because it would prevenet my disk from sleeping. I read something about loading it on a USB drive and another post about moving portions into memeoy via a script but that is not compatible with 9.1.1 as of yet. I like the USB idea, sounds easy enough but there is also concerns about multiple writes causing the USB drive to fail early.

 

[cyberjock]

They deleted all of the jails and plugins. The changed the jail location in the GUI. Then resetup all of the plugins and jails again.

 

[mefreema]

Perhaps yet another option could be to leave the jail where it is at and back it up. That zpool is built with 250gb drive which I have plenty of so I am less concerned with wear on those drives as I am with my 1Tb mirrored drives. It will just eat more power so hey I am not being "green". I saw one post that said to do a snapshot then replicate to my other zpool. So far i have not run into any good post about backing up the jail.

 

[mefreema]

They deleted all of the jails and plugins. The changed the jail location in the GUI. Then resetup all of the plugins and jails again.

That sounds easy enough. My setup is only a couple days old so i wont be loosing much.

 

[mefreema]

Any idea on the backup or USB option?

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, nobody really thinks about backing up the jail independently. Generally you throw it on your pool and either it gets backed up with your pool in whatever method you use or you might not back it up at all (/gulp).

 

[cyberjock]

I'd never do USB because the logs will certainly wear out your drive quickly.

 

[mefreema]

Yeah, nobody really thinks about backing up the jail independently. Generally you throw it on your pool and either it gets backed up with your pool in whatever method you use or you might not back it up at all (/gulp).

Ok my plan will be to delete my plugins and jail. Recreate my zpool as mirrored and redo my plugins. Then i will have harware redundancy. I will give up some space and performance but I think I can live with that. At the end of the day my 1tb mirrored zpool with family photos and home videos will be synced or manually back up to an external drive and kept off site like at my work. That's what REALLY matters anyway. :D Thanks so much for you input!