Updating hardware and OS version, how to keep data?

TrueNAS General
1

I’m currently running TrueNAS 25.04.2.4, and plan to change the server’s motherboard/CPU in the coming week.

I’ll be keeping the current pool’s drives.

I imagine the process is to export the pool, install the latest version of TrueNAS in the new system, then import the pool to it afterward.

Is it worth backing up the settings I use in TrueNAS 25.04.2.4 as well, or are the newer versions incompatible?

Also what’s the most recent version of TrueNAS Community Edition that’s generally considered “stable” at this time?

2

In my past experience, has been enough to remap the network after the motherboard swap, using the same boot disk / environment.

In your place, to be conservative, i would make a config backup (in any case), and then make a fresh install on another disk + config upload. I wouldn’t instead make the swap plus os upgrade together, just to have “less things to troubleshoot” in case something goes wrong somehow

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You can use all your disks, including the boot drive. You may have to manually reconfigure the network settings (if your new system uses a different nic vendor, e.g. intel instead of realtek or vice versa)

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You didn’t mention what brand and model your new board is, but hopefully you didn’t pick one with a Realtek network adapter.

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Really, the process is “move all the drives over, including the boot drive, and boot. Reconfigure network if necessary.” See also:

A reason to do otherwise might be if you wanted to change the boot method–you were using legacy boot, and want to use UEFI instead. In that case, I’d follow @oxyde’s conservative suggestion and do a clean install of the same version you’re running now, on a fresh boot device. But I don’t otherwise see a real reason to do this.

I’d equate “stable” to “General” on the software status page. According to that, the latest such release is 25.10.1.

Or in some cases, even a different NIC driver with the same vendor.

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