Title basically. I have like 7tb of data on my current raid array, and in the future, I plan to wipe it and make it ZFS, with 3 additional 7tb drives. I’d like to not lose all the data. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who has this issue. What do you guys use for temporary backup solution, while repurposing your HW.
My current server runs Ubuntu server bare metal. I’m thinking of running Proxmox, than VM of TrueNAS, for ZFS, sharing the storage pool across, what would than be a Proxmox cluster of 2 machines (potentially a 3rd in the future). I think that this is probably the best way.
Can’t you setup a new array with your new 3 drives, copy the data over, then expand your array with your old drives? IIRC zfs added support for expanding pools last year or so?
If you want to use a cloud provider, then your main problem will be uploading this much data and then downloading it back again, both price and time wise.
An easier solution is in fact copying the data over to another storage. Maybe borrow some pendrives from friends/family?
Expanding an array does work but you get less usable space compared to starting a new array from scratch. The old data doesn’t get restriped so you get a less efficient parity-to-data ratio, and this effect accumulates as you add more drives.
If you happen to have a symmetric gig pipe (or larger) that definitely helps :) I currently have 27 TBs in the cloud, for most of it, it was just easier to re-download it since the cloud VM had a 10 gig pipe compared to my gig down and 30 Mbps up (cries in Comcast…I moved and now I have access to AT&T fiber at up to 5 Gbps, its like $250/month though). I thnk I’m gonna move everything back locally, doing everything in the cloud was a temporary solution for when I lived with my parents for a few months. They weren’t too happy about the electricity bill of my 15 HDD, 8 NVME drive, 2x10G nic, 128 GB ECC, 1KW PSU running a Threadripper 2970wx, liquid cooled of course …and then having the AC running 24/7 to keep i cool. I had all of that crammed in a 4U server, which was pared down from my larger on which I was using at my other apartment.
with could storage I find I’m able to download large files from the webUI, but I could attach the bucket and just get the data from here.