Missing Files Between Local Snapshot and Remote Replicated Snapshot

TrueNAS General
1

Summary of Question

Hi all, first time poster and general TrueNAS/ZFS newbie. I recently started replicating my snapshots to an offsite installation of TrueNAS scale using a data replication task and wanted to do some manual validation of the integrity of the content on the remote but I’m finding some inconsistencies between the two datasets that I’m having trouble reconciling.

I’m not sure if I have an issue with my configuration and my data is being replicated improperly or if I have a misunderstanding of how the data should be viewed on the remote and everything is actually fine. I’m really hoping someone can help guide me towards a resolution/better understanding of replication.

My Setup

Local TrueNAS - Scale 24.10

Offsite TrueNAS - Scale 25.04

I do nightly snapshots and then use a nightly replication task to copy all of my snapshots to the remote install of TrueNAS.

I’m using the following Dataset structure (filtered down to only relevant datasets only):

Local TrueNAS (toolbox):

  • General
    • Files

Offsite TrueNAS (tacklebox):

  • General
    • toolbox_backups (this is where General from my local install targets it’s replication tasks)
      • Files

Observed Questionable Behavior

The snapshot and data replication jobs seem to be running successfully and the snapshots are appearing but I wanted to validate the content so I looked on the remote system and inspected a directory called Files/Documents/ where I keep a handful of miscellaneous files and noticed the number of files differ between my local TrueNAS and the dataset on the remote TrueNAS.

Local

# find /mnt/General/Files/.zfs/snapshot/auto-2026-01-10_00-00/Documents -type f | wc -l
13

Offsite

# find /mnt/General/toolbox_backups/Files/.zfs/snapshot/auto-2026-01-10_00-00/Documents -type f | wc -l
2

I see the same behavior in the actual directories themselves without looking at snapshots (e.g. /mnt/General/toolbox_backups/Files/Documents/)

What I Tried Myself

I tried doing some sleuthing on my own and validated some things like compression, dedup, and recordsize are the same between both systems:

# zfs get compression,dedup,recordsize General/Files
NAME           PROPERTY     VALUE           SOURCE
General/Files  compression  lz4             inherited from General
General/Files  dedup        off             default
General/Files  recordsize   128K            default

I tried a reboot just in case.

I tried cloning the latest snapshot on the offsite backup to a new dataset and inspecting the content of it which resulted in the same missing files.

Validated that my snapshot task and replication task are both configured to be recursive.