I’m currently planning on moving from Unraid to TrueNAS. Initially I thought I could simply connect my old drives and copy over the data, but that doesn’t seem possible from my search so far.
So, to migrate my data I came up with a couple of plans, but before I start doing stuff I wanted to gather some feedback, so I can avoid newbie-mistakes:
Current Setup:
Unraid with 1x20TB Parity + 2x20TB data drives, ~26TB used (and one 20TB drive spare)
Goal Setup
New (bigger) case, 3 more 20TB drives → TrueNAS with 6x20TB RaidZ2
Difficulties
I want to avoid buying a whole new set of hardware for migrating
Plan A: (Gaming PC as temporary host for TrueNAS, copy data from running Unraid)
- Prepare for data migration:
a. Install TrueNAS on Gaming PC SSD
b. Install new 20TB drives + spare in Gaming PC and create RaidZ2 Pool from them (= ~40TB usable space)
c. Question: No space for the drives, so they’d have to lay outside the case for the migration, is that fine? - Migrate data:
a. Import Data from Unraid (Docker compose, backups, Linux ISOs, etc…) via rsync (since I need hardlinks to be preserved)
b. Question: TEMP folder for migration, then create directory structure and move files?
c. QUESTION: how important is an UPS for this step? - Migrate hardware:
a. Move current server hardware to new case
b. Move TrueNAS boot drive + pool from gaming pc to new case
c. Move old Unraid drives to new case (for expanding later) - Testing
a. Move files into old directory structure
b. Bring up docker services 1 by 1
c. When everything works, expand Vdev with old Unraid HDDs
d. One 20TB drive becomes hot spare
Plan B (move hardware, then copy data to network share with external HDD enclosure)
- Migrate Hardware
a. Shutdown Unraid and move all hardware except drives to new case
b. Install new drives
c. Install TrueNAS, create Pool - Migrate Data
a. One drive at a time, put old drive into an external enclosure and copy to TrueNAS pool
b. Question: While I can’t mount the old drives, I should be fine creating a network share in TrueNAS and copy to that, right? - Testing, same as Plan A
Plan C (Create ZFS Pool in Unraid, export, install TrueNAS, import)
- Migrate Hardware
a. Shutdown Unraid and move all hardware to new case
b. Install new drives
c. Create ZFS Pool in Unraid - Migrate Data
a. Migrate Data to ZFS Pool
b. Export Pool
c. Shutdown Unraid, Install TrueNAS, import pool - Testing, same as Plan A
- Erase old Unraid drives and expand pool
Thoughts
It feels like no plan really is perfect.
Plan A is very complex, but I’d have my Unraid server running until everything works under TrueNAS.
Plan B is less complex, but I’m worried about copying data to a network share from an external enclosure. Additionally preserving hardlinks would be difficult/impossible.
Plan C seems the easiest, allowing me to keep both Unraid running and copying data without downtime and also allows for testing by simply changing the paths for in my compose files. At the same time, that sounds too good to be that easy