Core to Scale in 2026

TrueNAS General
1

I have been waiting to migrate from Core to Scale, and feel that now is the time. What is the current state of the migration? Can I go straight to the latest release of Scale? I plan to follow the guidance from Migrating from CORE | TrueNAS Documentation Hub

Anything else I should be thinking about? From what I hear, the most challenging part will be setting up my jails as containers (or whatever it is) in Scale.

2

I recently when from Core to Scale (I think 2 months ago) - I just need a clean install from USB. I haven’t converted my jails to containers yet. Still a learning curve for me - but I have time since it’s a home NAS. SMB setup is slightly different from CORE (still learning, maybe it the terminology but I got my share & home directory working) -

3

If I export my configuration, after upgrading and importing my config, will all my shares (NFS, SMB, etc.) be available? Or is that not part of the config?

4

That should work (got to put some trust in truenas developers hehe) - I was just in a rush to upgrade and didn’t read the DOCs didn’t export my config. - but I know my setup is simple and easy to recreate shares.

5

Home user here. I went from Core to Scale two or three months ago.

I didn’t have jails at that time since I migrated them to a mini PC with Proxmox and a couple of VMs.

I exported my data pools, did a new Scale install and imported them. Tested and everything was fine otherwise I could boot the Core disk.

I did a rearrangement of ownerships and permissions of most datasets, that I wanted to do anyway not that it was required from what I remember.

6

I am thinking of splitting my boot pool (2x256gb ssd, but formatted to 32gb as that was the size of my satadom that I originally had as my boot drive).

I would then:

  1. Backup config
  2. install the latest stable (25.10)
  3. Restore config (does this need to happen before or after importing the pool?)
  4. import pool
  5. setup jails(containers)
  6. then mirror boot pool again (this would be my “point of no return”)

I currently have my jails on a mirror of 2x512gb nvme drives. What is the best way to back this up? I’ve done some kind of zfs copy before but don’t recall. I do have snapshots, but I suspect they will be useless after the upgrade, correct?

7

Plugins and Jails are listed as can’t migrate.

8

Read the Preparing to Migrate document as mentioned.
Do so now before you detail your plan further.

While it can be used as a reference, using it like that may mean that you can end up digging yourself into a hole you could have avoided entirely if you had just read the document beforehand.

9

If you want to keep using jails, you may give FreeCORE a try.
Expect, however, some manual work to upgrade your jails from 13.x step by step to 15.1.