Hi everyone.
I’m new to TrueNAS and today I just installed TrueNAS ElectricEel R2.
For testing purposes, I plugged my USB disk into TrueNAS but couldn’t access or see my data. Besides I have 10TB of data in another HDD and I’m thinking of transferring it all using HDD Enclosure. Now, don’t know how to copy all removable disk data and paste it to TrueNAS. Please help.
TrueNAS doesn’t include any mechanism to do this, unless you want to do it manually at the shell. The recommended and supported way to get data onto your NAS is by sending it over the network using a file-sharing protocol.
In TN core, there Is a function in Storage → Import disk to do what you are tryng… but don’t know if Is available in Scale too (and if Is somehow reliable/manteined in core too, i used It just once and quite lot of time ago).
Btw, as already suggested, transfer over network will do the job
I believe, copy from/to is an essential feature for quick data transfer and TtueNAS doesn’t have that! 
By the way, network sharing is not possible so could you tell me the shell method?
That feature was removed around a year or so ago because there were problems with maintaining file attributes during transfers and iX decided to remove that feature in a previous version of scale.
Believe what you like; the feature isn’t there. It had been in earlier versions, but never worked well, and didn’t preserve permissions appropriately.
What do you mean? It’s a NAS, of course it’s possible.
Google will tell you all you need to know about mounting drives and moving files in Linux.
I’m using Scale and I don’t think it has this feature.
It isn’t; I didn’t think it was in CORE any more either. But definitely not in SCALE.
This is a pretty bad issue for me. New to truenas and would have thought this was something so fundamental I wouldn’t need to worry about it being there or not. Copying by network isn’t a solution, it takes 17 hours to copy a few TB’s by 1 gig network via windows 11 to the NAS. When I tried to copy via shell (rsync from /mnt/extdrive to /mnt/ByteBay/destination), what happened was the memory quickly filled up “Services” and nothing was actually written to disk. So… only network copy? really? 
I found this thread on reddit helpful:https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/1dbljmj/comment/l7szyt2
So now I’m trying to copy the files from inside a linux mint vm running on truenas scale, I can access the usb drive but I can’t access the smb shares. I’m guessing something to do with ACL’s or guest to host networking rules? Any hints? The vm has internet, the vm can reach my lan router (opnsense) but the vm can’t reach the lan ip of truenas which it’s running on.
edit: nevermind, I need to RTFM Accessing NAS From a VM | TrueNAS Documentation Hub
edit: I’m literally fussing with networking, and creating a vm, just to copy files from usb to my pool? This is 2025, right? Pretty please can we get an easy copy from usb option added back 
If you really want to do this then can’t you just set up a VM with the older version of Truenas that does support copying files via USB? Then copy your files, save config, upgrade Truenas to Scale with 2-3 steps, and import config file at each stage. However, good luck with preserving the file attributes.
But you’re right; it’s a lot of fathing about. My experience has been that copying over a 1GBe connection to a properly-configured bare-metal Truenas with 32GB RAM is significantly faster than USB3, given the bandwidth limitations of HDDs. HDD via USB → Win11 box I got around 65 - 70 MB/s with Windows File Explorer, but over network 1GBe from Win11 box → Truenas Core 12.x it was regularly 110 MB/s. This was with ~2GB video files as an example, but obviously any transfer time will be longer with lots of small files: for both methods.
Why not transfer by 1GBe with guaranteed file integrity, and do some more RTFM about Truenas in the meantime. It is an excellent system but to avoid frustration requires a lot of forethought into how to get the best out of it.
