Preserve Shadow Copies when moving files from WSE 2016 to Truenas Scale

TrueNAS General
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Hello all,

I am getting ready to move files from a Windows Server Essentials 2016 machine to a TrueNas Scale 24 machine. Main reasons are that the WSE box is literally only a file server, is way overkill for that purpose, and I have some other TrueNas systems and would like to only have one OS to deal with. Oh yes, and I hate Windows. I still have to endure using Windows desktops for now, but someday…!

Anyway. I have one question before I begin migrating data, and that has to do with Shadow Copies (which show up as Previous Versions when accessing the files over SMB from a Windows computer). I understand how Shadow Copies work on the WSE side, and understand how ZFS snapshots can be presented as Previous Versions on the TrueNas side. What I’m wondering is, is there any way to import/convert the existing Shadow Copies from WSE into the ZFS snapshots in TrueNas? Seems highly unlikely, but I’ve been happily surprised before!

Thanks for any help!

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Let’s go with “no”

Shadow Copies on TrueNAS are fundamentally, a view into your datasets’ snapshots.

Snapshots can’t really be retrospectively created.

You would have to rsync each shadow copy, over the dataset, take a snapshot, then repeat, until you can finally rsync the current data.

Instead, forget about the old shadow copies, and setup Tiered Snapshots for future shadow copies :wink:

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Ah well, that’s pretty much what I expected. I will just leave the old machine up and running long enough to give everyone a chance to access old versions of files they may need (which is a rare occasion as it is, so I’m not overly concerned).

Thanks so much for the YouTube tutorial on tiered snapshots. Excellently done. Earned my subscription. :wink: I realize it’s been a long time, but I would greatly appreciate the mentioned follow-up tutorial on replication! One of the tasks I need to set up with this transition is making back-ups to a second machine on site, and a third machine off site. I would love a tutorial on that topic that is as clear and comprehensive as your snapshots one!