After approx. 10 years I have fired up a PC which has an old version of FreeNAS (FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p6), ZFS data on 4 HDD with software raid 5. It was a small challenge to get it working again but it feels unstable. I have downloaded my most important data to other devices. Is there a way to upgrade to TrueNAS without loosing or transferring the data?
Otherwise, what is the last version of FreeNAS I can install and upload my xml file? The main reason being, if I keep it as a legacy box I want to have assurance if anything goes wrong I can rebuild it such as motherboard of main OS HDD failure. I have downloaded the backup xml file. I cannot find a v7 FreeNAS iso but I see many v11-13, it would be good to at least update to one of those.
Also If a data HDD fails, is it as simple as replacing it and it rebuilds itself?
The version is so old that I doubt there is an easy upgrade path.
That being said, you should be able to just mount the pool on the latest TrueNAS without any issues as long as your previous setup was just using normal SATA baremetal with no shenanigans like VM or SATA multiplier cards. You will have to recreate your users, groups, shares, etc. though. A tedious process, but very feasible.
Yes its a direct SATA connection with nothing fancy. Its been so long since I dabbled in all this I forgot my linux and PC knowledge and skills. If I mount it on a TrueNAS will it will pickup the software raid or I will have to setup it up? I thought that’s what the backup xml file was for but I guess its incompatible with TrueNAS.
Configuration backup file was *.db file on my latest version of TrueNAS scale and Core. The format may have changed.
Did that version use separate boot drives from the pool / data drives? If so, you should probably try to find another boot drive and do a clean install on that and see if your pool is recognized. If that doesn’t work, just go back to previous boot drive.
If you try it, do NOT upgrade any pool features to keep backwards compatibility with FreeNAS 7. You want to keep the same version of ZFS unless you are sure everything works. RAM min is 8GB (16GB recommended) I don’t know if installer will work under that?
You will have to import it manually. The format of the config file is no longer an xml file on TrueNAS (hasn’t been for a while).
And yes, what the other guy said. Don’t upgrade your pool. It will work just fine on the newer version without upgrade. Upgrading will not let your pool mount on your old FreeNAS should something go wrong and you need to go back to your previous setup.
Actually after a closer look, the disk mount point says I have UFS file system, not ZFS as i previously thought. hopefully this will also work?
I thought I had ZFS because it gave me ZFS warnings of Recommended minimum kmem_size is 256MB; expect unstable behavior Consider tuning vm.kmem_size or vm.kmem_size_min. I thought this was responsible for the restarts when I sometimes try to access certain folders or perform too many tasks such as multiple transfers.
Yes separate boot drive but I also see I have 1GB Ram. I will have to upgrade the RAM or have to go for a new PC altogether to use TrueNAS and transfer the 4 HDD.
That early version of FreeNAS probably didn’t use ZFS for boot and the UFS is used on the boot device. It appears all the data drives are ZFS, according to the OP first post.
