Disaster Recovery Process - single server

[JmarcSyd]

Hi all,

I have TrueNAS scale running happily on a simple PC with one SSD boot drive and two SATA SSDs mirrored in RAID1.
I am just wondering what is the process to recover in case of catastrophic hardware failure.

Assume the following for example:

• Motherboard and boot drive are both dead but the two SATA SSDs are functional.
• I do have a recent backup of the configuration.
• The user data itself is backed up to Onedrive but it would take hours to bring it back from the cloud.

I can get another PC with a new boot drive and easily reinstall TrueNAS from scratch.

BUT how do I recover my mirrored VDEV from my two SATA SSDs? And my existing configuration?

Is there a guide available to recover a failed TrueNAS server?

Thanks heaps!

JM

 

[NugentS]

Just re-install TrueNAS and upload the config using the menu optiojn. The pool will automatically import

 

[Whattteva]

There's nothing complicated about it really. Recovering is as simple as:

If you have config file backed up:

1. Reinstall TrueNAS on new boot drive.
2. Upload config file.
3. Reboot.
4. Profit.

If you don't have the config file backed up:

1. Reinstall TrueNAS on new boot drive.
2. Import existing pool.
3. Reconfigure your previous setup (ie. users, services etc.) from scratch (may take a while depending on how complex your previous setup was).
4. Profit.

Note, you may be able to recover your previous config file from either your old boot drive at /data/freenas-v1.db or from the pool at /var/db/system. There will be a bunch of db files in there. Just get the latest one. You can get a list of it with this command

Code:

find /var/db/system/ -type f -regex ".*2023.*\.db$"

Obviously, the latest one will be 20230518.db if you were to look at it today.

 

[JmarcSyd]

Thanks all. It looks simple indeed.
I'm going to run a simulation on a virtualized TrueNAS to fully understand how this works.

EDIT: I shut down my test TrueNAS VM on my ESXi server, created a new VM with a blank boot drive, connected the existing virtual disks containing the RAID1 VDEV from the test VM, installed TrueNAS from ISO image, restored the config file and everything is fully functional!

I'm very impressed that it was so easy and the mirrored VDEV was up and running straight away.

 

[sretalla]

connected the existing virtual disks containing the RAID1 VDEV from the test VM

Just be aware that you're currently playing with a config that will lose your data.

Please read this before continuing with important data on that system:

"Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

www.truenas.com

 

[JmarcSyd]

Just be aware that you're currently playing with a config that will lose your data.

Please read this before continuing with important data on that system:

"Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

www.truenas.com

Thanks but that was just a test system with no real data to understand how to recover a failed machine. Although I'm a little tempted to test Raw Device Mapping on a spare SATA drive now

 

[Whattteva]

Thanks but that was just a test system with no real data to understand how to recover a failed machine. Although I'm a little tempted to test Raw Device Mapping on a spare SATA drive now

Oh boy, not the RDM!

CC: @jgreco is going to have nightmares from a decade ago.