Move App Dataset from ixVolume

[amacal1]

My first few Truenas apps I spun up using 25.04.1, I used the default “ixVolume” location for the app datasets. Later, I created user-defined datasets for most of my other apps. However, now that I’ve been using those initial apps for a bit, I’d prefer not to start over with them. Can I move each dataset for those apps to a user-defined location?

Part of the issue is that I have a bunch of random-sized small SSDs in that machine running most of my apps. It wasn’t obvious that I could easily make a proper pool from those vdevs, so I have no mirroring or raidz. Theoretically, I could lose a drive at any moment and take the app data with it. With the user-defined datasets, I am comfortable running like this because I will set up replication jobs to back up app data to another storage machine I’m spinning up later this week. If a drive goes down taking a bunch of services with it, I’ll just toss in some other drive and replicate the data back and be up and running again.

On another note entirely, if I do have all app datasets defined manually in user-defined locations, do I still require a pool dedicated only for apps? If so, can someone explain what that “app pool” would be doing since each app has a user-defined dataset on other pools?

[Stux]

There is a feature request for this, you should vote for it

Add ability to convert "ix-volume" to "host path"

When creating a an application, its very simple to use the ix-volume option, where the system will create a system managed dataset and export for the application. It can be very challenging for a user to extract their data from the IX-Volume if they later decide that they would like to have the data easily available on their pool for replication, snapshots or migration purposes. In order to resolve this it would be very useful if there were a “convert to host path” type option for IX-Volumes. …

[manna]

I don’t know if it has changed in 25.04, but at least in 24.10 you could pretty easily use a program like WinSCP to view the data in the ixVolume and copy it over to a new dataset you created. I would use the shell or SMB to copy it though because it is much slower on WinSCP.

@amacal1

On another note entirely, if I do have all app datasets defined manually in user-defined locations, do I still require a pool dedicated only for apps? If so, can someone explain what that “app pool” would be doing since each app has a user-defined dataset on other pools?

As far as I can tell an app pool is really useful when you want to have the apps run off of faster SSDs and store the bulk data (like videos for Plex for example) on cheaper HDDs. That way you get the speed from the SSDs and the space of the HDDs. If you are running totally on SSD, I don’t think you need to separate it out. Unless you want to have different amounts of parity for the app data and the bulk data or something like that. Since you are running without parity in this machine I don’t think that matters in this case either.

[amacal1]

@Stux

There is a feature request for this, you should vote for it

Voted! Thanks.