After a failed hardware upgrade (which went so far as successfully installing internal boot on the new system), I found too many issues and am reverting back to my original build which has been running without issue for around 4 years.

There are two issues:
1. Not being able to use my unRAID backup files
2. unRAID won't accept my ZFS encryption key which I know is correct and I know is being pasted into the text field correctly

I'm putting both of these issues in a single post because if we can resolve issue 1 then issue 2 will be resolved as well.

Issue 1:
It started off with every backup I have made being unbootable on this UEFI-only system that has had no problems booting unRAID on USB media for many years via multiple attempts including:
-unRAID USB creation tool on Windows (loading a backup file)
-unRAID USB creation tool on Linux (loading a backup file)

-Rufus: format as Large FAT32 then create FreeDOS then dumping the backup files on there

There are 4 different backup files from v7.3.2 and none of them result in a bootable USB media using the above attempts.

What ended up working is the unRAID USB creation tool on Linux loading a stock 7.3.2 image, forcing me to install from scratch.

But it seems that if I could just get one of my backups to be bootable then this problem would resolve itself because it was loading the ZFS encryption keyfile just fine before the hardware upgrade.


Issue 2:
Incredulously, unRAID is claiming that my ZFS encryption key is invalid. Here are the steps that I followed:
1. Created the pools for my drives - each pool has a single drive, both drives are ZFS encrypted with the same key which I did before the upgrade in unRAID 7.3.2

2. Entered the ZFS encryption key from my password manager into the text field under "Passphrase". Click Start to accept the key and start the pools.

3. The pools did not start. I scroll down to find that it says "Wrong key".

There there known issues with ZFS encryption passphrase/keyfile in 7.3.2? I have no idea what to do about this other than to finally abandon this scrappy and unreliable software.

I found the hack that makes my backups bootable:
1. Using the unRAID USB Creator (I used it on Linux), create a stock image of the version from your backup, mine was 7.3.2.

2. Remount the newly created unRAID USB media and delete everything except for EFI folder.

3. Unzip your backup file and copy over the contents except for the EFI folder that's in the backup file.

Done. You should now be able to boot into your backup.

unRAID clearly has a bug with corrupting the EFI folder contents during backup creation!

And for the ZFS key issue, I discovered that my backup used a single drive at the time for a pool but I later created a mirror. When I was recreating my existing pools I thought that the mirrored device would suffice but no it wanted the original device (even though they were mirrored and had the same ZFS key). So unRAID clearly has a misleading error message in this situation where the wrong pool member was used - it should say that instead of saying that the key is wrong because the key isn't what failed.

Edited September 14Sep 14 by gusgus

Mods if you could flag this as a bug report that would be very helpful, I don't see how I am able to do it.