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?
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.
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 $250/month though). I thnk I’m gonna move everything back locally, doing everything in the cloud was a temporary solution for when I lived with my parents for a few months. They weren’t too happy about the electricity bill of my 15 HDD, 8 NVME drive, 2x10G nic, 128 GB ECC, 1KW PSU running a Threadripper 2970wx, liquid cooled of course …and then having the AC running 24/7 to keep i cool. I had all of that crammed in a 4U server, which was pared down from my larger on which I was using at my other apartment.
with could storage I find I’m able to download large files from the webUI, but I could attach the bucket and just get the data from here.
Expanding an array does work but you get less usable space compared to starting a new array from scratch. The old data doesn’t get restriped so you get a less efficient parity-to-data ratio, and this effect accumulates as you add more drives.
Convince a friend that they need a storage solution, buy the drives for them, use them temporarily and make a friend really happy and slightly poorer.
The Friend get to smile more with all that data to consume?
You can get a hetzner 20TB storage box for ~40$. Accessible over the internet via SMB. I get 1gig read/write, my internet doesn’t handle more so not really sure what’s the limits
If you are comfortable in answering which country/region are you from?
I barely get speeds over 5-10mbps(1MB/s) with symmetrical gig personal connection from Asia/SEA region which I assume is due to poor routing and peering issues.
Make a backup, set the new drives as a LVM, move over the files and grow the fs to use the emptied discs.
You do have backup disks, don’t you?
Burn 3,192 DVDs
This is the way!
offtopic, what data do you store? Photos? I was always curious about people who use a lot of storage
Photography RAWS mostly. Only about a tb. Then Home assistant and the proxmox VMS, family pics. One day security camera. Still need to pick a nas as mine is 3copies on a das. I’d like plex or jellyfin transcoding 4 bay. Or a low power 1ru. Don’t think they exist.
Mdadm can be set up with one drive. Then just add the second drive after data transfer.
Buy a single external, use it as a backup after migrating.
Sorry to be this guy but do you not have a backup of your data? This would solve this and other potential future issues.
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.
Realize I have no way to backup 10s of TBs, cry, destroy my ZFS pool and start over. 90% of my stuff is media which I can easily reacquire from Usenet in about 1.5-2 weeks of 24/7 downloading. So, not really a hassle, it just takes forever.
If you have good upload bandwidth (like if you’re on fiber and have a 1 gig upload) IDriveE2.com has pretty reasonable pricing, it’s object storage (think S3) not block storage (any normal filesystem) though, but if you’re just using it for a backup that shouldn’t matter. I apparently got in right before they doubled their prices and got 50 TB for a year for $500. They have “on demand pricing” which is more expensive than their yearly plans, but it’s currently $4/TB/month so that would only cost you like $30…assuming you can upload all your data to their servers.
- Buy 2 20 TB disks and put them in an old PC you have lying around.
- Create a ZFS mirror on that PC
- transfer the data to that PC
- create your ZFS array in your server and transfer the data back
- use the PC with the 20 TB mirror as backup system
how is it possible to have 7TB of local data?
Media server.
Make azure free acc, create VM and add 15tb, install self hosted cloud service, transfer your data there, done.
VM should last about a month, but don’t send sketchy files like porn or something.
I don’t know what your 7TB is, but I know what my TBs of data are and my approach in this situation was to just nuke anything that was available from its original source, backup the few things that were orphaned to an external drive and pull everything down again onto the new array.