I had to reduce my POOL in size by removing some drives and I first
Backed my data
Backed up my configuration in advanced settings
Destroyed my pool
Removed the a few hard drives
Imported my saved configuration
The issue is it is not able to recreate my pool and I’m guessing it is because it can’t find all the drives that were there before.. Is my assessment correct? If so, that means I have to create my pool manually but how can I automatically recreate all my shares? Did I miss something? I already tried to create my pool manually and then import my configuration but that destroyed everything and I was back to the issue from before where it the pool is created by there are no disks assigned… I hope I don’t have to recreate all my shares manually….
You don’t have to re upload your config backup… Truenas will try to import pools that you destroyed and that most likely borks it. Destroying the pool and creating a new one should be enough. But you will have to re-create your Dataset layout and your share setups.
Ahhhh crap… That is going to be a major pain in the butt.. But was I right? That worked for me once but only when the pool was with the same disks configuration, it was able to recreate the datasets but during a reduction procedure there is no way to get that done? If that is the case, that would be a very good feature to have, would be a huge time saver.
I guess my other option would have been to take some snapshots. I mean I did have backups with rsync but there is no way to get this to work the way I want it to create everything automatically.
How do you expect truenas to do it? Dataset structure is saved on the data pool not in the config. The config only tells truenas “Hey if you find this pool import it” and “Hey if the pool got imported recreate the shares related to that pool” If truenas doesn’t find the pool it can’t do anything.
What I meant was, a dataset configuration, just the settings like the name, security, etc, something that could be saved and when you want to restore to recreate it for you when you load it without having to do it manually. Surelyt that could be done.
It would probably help to know what your setup was to start with, 12 wide Raid-Z2, and what you were trying to achieve, 7 wide Raid-Z2. How you did your backup is also important. Did you use snapshots with ZFS Replication?
Guessing you should have started with that and asking for advice from the experienced users on the forums for ideas or best practices.
I assumed based on passed experience but that was after expanding my VDEV and I was able to import and all the data and datasets was still there, obviously what I am doing now is different since the data had to be wiped following a reduction of the VDEV.
I did a rsync replication, saving my data to another TRUENAS system but that is different from a snapshot or ZFS Replication so while I can copy from-to, I still need to recreate my datasets.
I guess I wrongfully assumed that saving a configuration would recreate everything for me, the structure at least (datasets and security assigned to them, etc). So I guess I gained experience and I know now this is not how it works… I do still think there would be value in saving a dataset configuration and to use that to quickly load into a system to create that automatically (and yes that means manually data copy after or automate it through rsync or something).
So I guess in the future I have to find a better backup strategy instead of rsync and perhaps see if I can save snapshots or partial snapshots from one truenas system to another.
If i may say, with respect on your opinion, I think you’re overcomplicating things by going against the grain.
We have 2 levels, appliance (TN) and data (ZFS)… There Is no need for TN to handle data when ZFS Is capable of everything.
In hindsight, for your case, as already pointed replication was the better choice to preserve everything possible from previous pool during the process (have made the same for myself converting my pool from a raidz1 to raidz2 long time ago)
