I have a Synology DS1515+ as my NAS at the moment, and I want to move from it to TrueNAS. I want to reuse my 3x4TB drive for TrueNAS, so a migration using a network connection is out of the way. Actually, I have around 6TB of data on the Synology.
I was thinking the following strategy: I have an 8TB USB drive that I can probably use to copy all my data on, then remove and format my 3x4TB in TrueNAS and copy back from the 8Tb to the ZFS pool. Any chance this could work?
I’ll probably use the File Browser App to move the files from the 8Tb to the ZFS Pool, but that brings a few questions, such as:
How can I mount the drive for TrueNAS to recognize it?
Which file system format should I use (ZFS if probably not a choice on Synology)?
I can mount the drive internally, extract it from its inclosure, instead of using USB, would that be preferable (certainly faster, as my TrueNAs is USB2 only)?
I’m also open to other ideas, so I welcome them for analysis and thinking!
Yea, that is something I thought after posting my question, could be the easiest way for sure. Probably not the quickest, but who knows how much trouble the direct hard drive solution could be!
Like mentioned in my initial post, I need to move the HDD from one to the other. So migrating over the network is really unlikely to happen. Maybe that was not stated clearly enough in my initial post.
As someone else has said, network copies over SMB to your PC is the technically simplest, but it will be slow. (You should consider physically connecting your NAS ethernet port directly to your PC ethernet port if you can get faster speeds.)
Alternative approaches:
Depending on how your Synology drives are formatted, you can see if they could be moved across and mounted with their current file system on your TrueNAS box. (Don’t try this for real until you are certain.) If you can then you mount them there, use Linux cp to copy them to the USB drive (also mounted locally), then unmount the old drives and create a ZFS pool with them, create datasets, and cp the files back again. (Use cp not mv so you can verify if you need to.)
As above but copy off the existing drives on Synology and copy back on TrueNAS. But you will need to be sure that the 8TB USB drive can be mounted and accessed on both boxes.
I would suggest doing the transfer via SMB on a PC, but use an application that synchronizes two volumes so that you can resume the transfer, and run it multiple times.
Then repeat from the pc to the new nas.
Unfortunate I can’t recommend a synchronizing application for windows. If you were using a Mac I’d suggest Carbon Copy Cloner.
@Stux Your idea of using CCC is great. I’m on a Mac, in fact! But have access to a Windows computer as well if required.
CCC offers a 30 free trial, which is good enough for me to transfert my stuff once. I had a copy of CCC V5, but did not renew as now we can no longer make a bootable drive from it. So my new strategy is to use my NAS for most everything, and my local SSD is only for temporary stuff and the OS.
So I started the backup yesterday. CCC suggested I used a file system on my 8Tb that is case sensitive, and I formatted it in HFS+ Case sensitive and the process is underway at the moment. Over Ethernet GE it is somewhat slow, but it can take the time required.
@Stux Ah, no, sorry if it sounded like I used or believed I should used a disk image. I simply reformatted the HDD in a HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) Case sensitive to make CCC happy, and I’m copying a folder from the Synology to another folder on the external HDD on my Mac.
The idea to redo the clone as a double check is great, I would have skipped that, but that is a great safety net to have. Thank you
Once that is done, I’ll move my 3x4Tb to my TrueNAS box, then I’ll simply recopy the stuff using CCC to the destination shared/folder on the TrueNAS box.
Less than one TB of copy to go before I can proceed with the next steps
