Migrating from TrueNAS SCALE to unRAID

[NettoHikari]

Hello everyone!

 

I took quite some time to read up information on unRAID within the last couple days and I'm 100% sure that this is the product for me. For this reason, I just bought the Pro version of unRAID and I'm more or less ready to migrate from TrueNAS SCALE to it.

 

My usecase:

• Serve files to the local network
• Create scheduled, encrypted backups of an important part of this data to 2 separate cloud providers at night (using Duplicati)
• Media server (using Jellyfin)
• Password storage (using Vaultwarden)
• etc.

 

I'm using a pretty old platform for this:

• AMD FX-8320E (4 cores, 8 threads)
• 24 GB RAM
• 4x 10 TB SAS-HDDs connected through a RAID controller in IT mode
• 5 SSDs of varying size for things like docker containers, VMs, cache, etc.
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

 

I used to run all my stuff bare-metal (and later virtualized on Proxmox) on a rackmounted server, which was quite a lot beefier, but used a lot more power and it also sounded like a jet engine, so only recently, I repurposed this old hardware that I had laying around to check out TrueNAS SCALE, which works fine, but has some features that I just don't need or like for my scenario (for instance K3s or ZFS).

 

I'm planning to purchase new hardware at some point, especially to be able to lower power consumption significantly, but for now, this works.

 

I prefer standard Docker and I'd also like to use a file system that doesn't claim huge amounts of my RAM for caching purposes. I'm aware of the performance and data safety benefits of ZFS, but I'd still like to move to unRAID's XFS approach, even if it's slower.

 

So here's my actual question:

Can I somehow migrate my data (roughly ~12 TB) off my RAID-Z2 to XFS without having to acquire more drives to temporarily copy my stuff over to? I'm not that knowledgable when it comes to ZFS, so I figured I'll just ask here before looking for a temporary storage medium for my data migration.

 

Thank you very much for your time!

 

Regards,

- NH

Edited December 22, 2023 by NettoHikari
I used TrueNAS SCALE and not CORE

[NettoHikari]

Just adding to my question here...

 

Given that my most important files are safely backed up off-site, could I just do the following to migrate my data away from RAID-Z2?

 

1. Take one drive offline and mark as faulted, purposefully degrading the pool:

zpool offline -f poolname disk-identifier

 

2. Use fdisk (or similar tool) to create a fresh partition table on that disk.

 

3. Create a temporary file system on that disk to copy everything over there without redundancy (again, it'd be nice to have the data migrated, but it's not vital).

 

4. Destroy the pool.

 

5. Install unRAID.

 

6. Create new Array.

 

7. Copy data over there.

 

8. Format the drive again and add it to the array.

[Vr2Io]

As you have RAID-Z2 pool, so it allow two disk failure / missing, and you have 12TB data which can't fit in one 10TB disk.

 

You shouldn't destroy the RAID-Z2 pool, just cleanup two disk under Unraid and format it, then boot back TrueNAS and confirm it can mount both, then copy all data to those disks.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Vr2Io

[NettoHikari]

Thank you very much. That's exactly what I ended up doing. The migration is currently running.

[NettoHikari]

Just chiming in again to say that this worked flawlessly. All data is intact and I'm very happy with unRAID.

[Skysec]

Hello, new to unraid and swapping from Truenas. How do i cleanup two disk under Unraid and format it?

[JorgeB]

12 hours ago, Skysec said:

How do i cleanup two disk under Unraid and format it?

You can just assign them to the array or a new pool and re-format them.