I am clueless. I have googled and not found more than migration instructions. The thing is that I don’t want to migrate my config, I just want to do a clean install and attach my existing disks.
I run an old TrueNAS 12.0-U3 at home (personal use) today and would like to go TrueNAS SCALE.
I do not care about my setup but I do care about my data.
It’s two mirrored SATA WDC WD120EDAZ-11F3RA0 with 3 Pools where 1 is encrypted.
All are lz4 compressed and no dedup.
Is it possible for me to install a clean TrueNAS SCALE to the SSDs (where the existing TrueNAS is installed) and then attach the ZFS Pools that I am currently running without data loss (on the SATA disks of course)?
Anyone done it? Anything I should be aware of? Anything I should look out for?
(Yes, will make backups of the files I can’t live without but I’d prefer not having to restore)
zfs can be imported on a new system. ACL attached to fs will be preserved as long as you have same user group names.
But share information and configuration will not go with ZFS. For example, smb ACL might require revisited.
If you have any jails on it. You are likely to rebuild these.
My worries are about the compatibility of partitioning and ZFS versions between TrueNAS 12.0-U3 and TrueNAS SCALE.
I want to start the setup of my NAS from scratch (because of old legacy stuff built on mistakes that was built on mistakes) and the ACLs will be cleaned out as soon as I am sure all data is intact. No jails, no nothing should be moved over to the new setup.
No need to worry about ZFS versions. New version will import old version and will offer to upgrade. You can choose to upgrade to new ZFS if you want. If the old version works fine, I do not suggest an upgrade without full backup.
“RED FLAG”.
It seems you are using GELI encrypted pool. I don’t know if SCALE support importing GELI encrypted pools as ZFS has moved to the newer Native encryption scheme.
TrueNAS CORE will allow you to import GELI encrypted pool as Legacy, but you really need to migrate your data to a pool that is created with the newer ZFS version.
At least, make sure you have your GELI keys saved and accessible some other places.
God no! I left GELI. This is a ZFS encrypted pool. Only one out of three is encrypted.
Hundred years ago I added a disk and all went well… Until I rebooted and I lost everything because adding a new disk changed the encryption key.
After that I always made sure to have exported key on USB memorystick hidden in another place.
It’s that trauma that is making me nervous about my little migration adventure here.
I only migrated from GELI to the new Native encryption a few month ago.
So you are using the Native encryption then?
In that case, according to iXsystems (need to be double checked, though), TrueNAS SCALE can access CORE pool and vice versa, at least from the point of view of the latest CORE 13.1.
I think there is a path for upgrading from TrueNAS but you need to be update to TrueNAS 13.1-U6 and then change the release to SCALE. This process should let you keep the existing snapshots of the boot environment and you can then go back to CORE if this doesn’t work for you.
At least, this is the theory. I personnaly have no experience with the upgrade path.
Sorry for hijacking this thread. But my topic is (hopefully) related and I did not want to start a new thread.
I am planning to upgrade my trueNAS core to scale. As OP I am concerned about my data and I keep reading about the GELI encryption. I cant remember how I set up my trueNAS system as it way some time ago and my first try doing it blind. So it might have DIY flavor to it
Anyhow, I cannot find any hint towards GELI in my trueNAS system. The only thing I find is “Legacy Encryption” in the pools overview (~see screenshot~ I wasn’t allowed to upload a screenshot). Yet, I don’t know what it means and if it is a red flag for a clean Install and keeping the pool.
Can I just clean install and it will work or will my data be lost then?
SCALE (or any Linux system for that matter) will be unable to decrypt the underlying GELI-encrypted block devices. You won’t be able to import or access the ZFS pool, unless you stick with Core.[1]
The only way to use TrueNAS SCALE with this data would be to create a brand new pool on Core 13.3 (without GELI encryption), and then replicate or copy everything over to it.
If you have access to a second machine, you could also install SCALE, create a new pool, and then replicate the dataset(s) from the Core 13.3 server to the SCALE server. (If you want to use native ZFS encryption, you’ll have to set this property on the Core side, which will create and encrypt the data on the SCALE side upon receiving the stream. Later on, you can decide to have the new children inherit their encryption properties “upwards” to a common parent.)
Technically, it’s “possible” to do this without creating a new pool, by manually using the command-line in FreeBSD to shuffle around the underlying block devices, replacing them one by one with non-encrypted partitions. This requires the pool to be comprised of only mirror vdevs. It would also be risky and probably fail due to Murphy’s Law. ↩︎
This is risky. If anything happens to the external drive (or data saved within) during this process, and you don’t have a true backup, then you risk losing some or all data.
The “portable” USB drives (with a 2.5" HDD inside) are especially bad for nonstop I/O of continuous writes and reads.
Do you have an extra drive that can at least hold everything while you do this? (Not the same USB drive, but a different one in addition to the drives that will be used for the back and forth transfer.)
Well I wanted to add another nas drive anyways. So I guess I just get another one. Maybe one double the size of the existing ones for a different pool for not too important data. I haven’t put much thought into that because I was hoping to get around that encryption issue.
