My 3 bays NAS recently reported issues, but then claims there’s no issue upon reboot.
Now I’m afraid of the possibility that the system can die out of nowhere, I ordered another drive and connect it with USB, as the back up of the NAS.
Initially I formatted it as Btrfs, but putting it into TrueNAS doesn’t seem to get recognized…So I just formatted it ZFS with GUI.
Then I just ssh in and rsync my NAS pool into my BackUp pool. Done, drive remove.
Everything works as intended…but that’s not what TrueNAS think.
“NOOO THE POOL “BACKUP” IS OFFLINE!! EMERGENCY!!! EVERYONE GETS DOWNNNN”
I’m on HexOS, so that alert is like, always on my face.
I kind of want to just remove the pool so it doesn’t freak out…but is it safe?
I know that I need to back up config for my ZFS pools if I want to reinstall TrueNAS, I assume that’s for some metadata in the OS that’s required for parsing drives as a valid pool.
Is it the case for a single drive ZFS?
If I just remove the pool, and plug that one single drive back in, would it be parsed correctly?
If not, what should I prepare? Or is there something I’m overlooking that nullifies my issue here?
You probably need to use the HexOS GUI to export the drive. Not from the command line. Basically you confused the GUI because you made the pool with the GUI, the rest of the work was command line.
Yes, it is perfectly reasonable to use a 1 disk ZFS pool for backups. I do it routinely, either with eSATA or USB enclosures.
However, an external backup disk is not a replacement for the NAS’ internal pool drive(s). I don’t know how HexOS does configuration backups… you should ask in their forum. But, in TrueNAS’ case, you backup the configuration, (GUI or CLI), and can use that file for restoring the configuration. You can use a backup disk to restore the data of the NAS if that is needed too.
Not completely sure what you’re saying, but does that mean if I just delete the pool, it’s possible for the drive to just become un-parsable?
And yes, I did ask in HexOS forum, got no reply for a day, thus asking here.
It shouldn’t be an issue though, because I made the pool inside TrueNAS GUI, HexOS doesn’t even allow pool creation with a single drive at this moment.
The TrueNAS configuration is not required to import a pool. A ZFS pool is always self-contained. The TrueNAS configuration includes details like periodic snapshots, shares, periodic scrub config etc. Note that if you use encryption with key files you need the key files or you won’t be able to decrypt the data.
The ZFS terminology you are looking for is to “export” a pool. We don’t use the term “remove” in that context. You can use the “export” button in the Web-UI. Don’t check the “delete data” checkbox though.
