The title says it all. I have inherited an old system that seems to be working fine but is way out of date. I want to get it current but suspect that I am facing a complete re-install.
I’m a newbie with TrueNAS so would appreciate any tips … are there any shortcuts that would be easier than a complete rebuild?
In case it matters the box is mainly and NFS server with about 3TB of data. There is a little bit of SMB. There are no containers/apps involved.
If you’re really a newbie just ride the update train from the web interface until the end.
You can upgrade from the latest version of a release to the latest version of the next release.
So if you’re running the latest Angelfish upgrade to the latest Bluefin. From there you upgrade to the latest Cobia and then from there to Dragonfish. And the you’re up to date and ready for the release of Electric Eel.
Hah! That almost sounds too easy! I imagine a few things will break with each step. Would you suggest pausing between steps and fixing whatever is broken before continuing. Or saving it all up 'til the end?
I see I can back up the configuration settings in an sql DB. Is that useful? And should I take a new backup between each step?
I would do a short test drive after every step. But so far all my upgrades between releases have been flawless.
When you start an upgrade Scale automatically offers to save the current config. Do this. This is your insurance when something really goes wrong. Then you just can reinstall the release you started the upgrade from and restore the config.
Thanks for the advice. I’m thinking about how much backing-up of data I need too do. Do you recall if any of the upgrades significantly touch the storage devices? I need to refresh my memory on ZFS. I’ll do some reading. Thanks
Read the major release notes for each step. Take action on anything that the release notes say you need to resolve before the upgrade.
If anything goes wrong you can revert to a previous boot environment, and ask questions 
Do not upgrade your pool version until you are sure you don’t want to revert to an earlier version of the OS.
Dragonfish and Cobia do use the same pool
Versions though.
There are significant changes between Angelfish and Bluefin. Read all the release notes, as Stux suggested, but pay extra attention to:
Just to close this out. The series of upgrades from Angelfish to Dragonfish went perfectly. Most impressive. Thanks for the tips.
