How trustworthy is TrueNAS system update?

TrueNAS General
1

I noticed that there is an update, my process with updates that can break things like DNS, OPNSense firewall, etc:

  1. Read the release note
  2. Make sure the latest backup was done
  3. Update

However, I crossed a post here the other day where a dataset was locked after a system update, the user got luck that TrueNAS appears to run some auto backup or something along the lines.

I also have my datasets encrypted and the plain text keys saved on Bitwarden, how likely is things things to break during updates on TrueNAS??

The only answer should be hardly ever but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I really don’t wanna find that out the hard way, I run Debian as my servers and it is as solid as it can get regarding updates but idk how TrueNAS does it, how serious they test things before releasing to the public.

Thank you

2

I did every available updates for truenas scale (now CE) since the very first beta release from 2022 and never had a single issue with the truenas base, only with the old third party truecharts apps. Mostly because they relied on packages that were sometimes removed during a truenas update (something like the kubernetes storage driver comes to mind)
After 24.10 and the switch to docker there were 0 issues with apps (also because i now use my own compose stacks), but then again i only run 4 apps directly on truenas, the rest runs inside a debian lxc…

3

Well, no release is recommended for “general use” immediately upon its release, and the last several weren’t recommended for “general” until the .2 release (e.g., 24.10.2, 25.04.2). The next-most-stable option in their status categories is “early adopter,” which they define as pre-release code.

So, how safe is it to update? If you update to a release marked as “general,” pretty safe, usually.

1 Like
4

I’ll die on the hill “NAS isn’t Proxmox” :sweat_smile: so mine is a pure dumb NFS NAS.

Aha I was wondering that, it was tagged as early adopter or something, and I couldn’t find stable channel only like OPNSense for example.

Thanks a lot :folded_hands:

5

You can do that in 25.10, but not in earlier releases. If you’re on a release that’s marked as “general” (which 25.10.3 is), you can set the system to only show updates on the General train.