Most efficient way to transfer data between different file system drives

shant1993 · 11. April 2016

Hello everyone, i have decided to move to omv coming from a freenas user,
to keep this simple im going to refer the hdds as green drives and red drives.
i have 2xgreen drives, both running ZFS, i am about to get 2x red drives and move my around 5TB data to red drives and of course have them formatted as ext4,
what is the most efficient way to do this ? the only way i see it is that i have to format the 2x reds as NTFS in my desktop running windows,move the data on the reds running ntfs, install omv on my nas and format the 2xgreen ones to ext4, move my data back to the 2xgreen drives on omv, install the 2x reds in the nas now running omv, format them as ext4 and move data again from green to reds.

do i have an easier way around this?
Thank you.

ryecoaaron · 11. April 2016

Put all four drives in a system and rsync them. You could do this in OMV as well. Otherwise, you could use a bootable linux distro like systemrescuecd.

shant1993 · 11. April 2016

you mean dual boot omv on my desktop along with windows, format the drives as ext4, rsync them and then move the drives to the nas ?
wouldn't that cause issues with my windows installation? or my other ntfs drives?

ryecoaaron · 11. April 2016

You don't install systemrescuecd (or gparted live or ubuntu live). It just runs on your computer. When you are done, take the drives out and it will boot to windows again. Can you put all four drives in the box that is going to eventually run OMV?

shant1993 · 11. April 2016

yes i can put all four of them in the nas, and i will eventually mirror the green drives in omv, why do you ask?
let me see if i understood you correctly, i should boot either systemrescuecd or omv on a flash drive on my desktop machine,have the reds installed there and formatted as ext4 then use rsync between freenas and one of those OS's, when i am done i simply format my green drives and freenas to omv and install the reds on it, correct ?

ryecoaaron · 12. April 2016

Nope

Install OMV on OMV box. If you are installing on a flash drive, install omv-extras and flashmemory plugins right away.
Update box to latest OMV
Install all four drives in OMV box. Install omv-extras (if haven't already) and zfs plugin.
Configure zfs plugin and create shared folder(s)
Format reds ext4 and create shared folder(s) - might need the unionfilesystem plugin with mergerfs to make two reds look like one drive.
Create an rsync job syncing zfs folders to red folders.

No need to use Windows box for anything other than browser access. You could actually leave the system setup this way and just reverse the rsync to backup the reds on a scheduled interval.

Zoki · 12. April 2016

And if you want to be safe and keep the FreeNAS until OMV is up and running, set up OMV and rsync all data from the FreeNAS via rsync. Be sure to be on a local fixed network, no wifi.
Might take quite some time for the first rsync to complete, but you can still use the FreeNAS. Just before switching, repeat the rsync process to copy changed files to omv.

shant1993 · 13. April 2016

ohhh, great!
awesome,i am awaiting hdd shipment now, thank you for your time!

shant1993 · 18. April 2016

i would like to note that i installed both freenas and omv in virtualbox just to test it out before i did anything,i created a ZFS hard drive with freenas and copied a file there and then used that drive in omv with the zfs plugin installed , at first it wouldn't import due to some error, so i used the -f (force) flag in the terminal and had it imported successfully, however the files i copied with freenas in the hdd wasn't found in omv, after some search i found following:

Zitat

Import your existing Pool ( use option in ZFS menu) ; remember that latest FreeNAS pools (9.3 and up) can't be imported due a Feature Flag not still implemented on ZFS for Linux (9.2 and down can be imported without problem), So please revise what feature Flags have your pool beforo to try to import on OMV

link to original thread.

i am running freenas 9.3 so I will instead usb boot omv on my main desktop, use rsync between freenas and omv, then do a clean install on the nas and move the hdds, i will post back if i get any new experiences.

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