All the good old time do come to an end one time.
I am not joking here, freeNAS using BSD (freeBSD, I think), has been a really reliable NAS for its time, in particular since it was using ZFS.
In fact, I put all my data in a freeNAS ZFS pool. It was Easy to manage and deal with, until freeNAS turned into trueNAS.
It was not easy, as I recall, but I managed to run the proper update programs to finally end up with an operating trueNAS system, still having my data in my original ZFS pool. That was until.....
Someone decided to f#-up trueNAS by porting it from BSD to Linux. While I am generally would go along with such a move, I would like to have some safeguards for random users.
While I am not considering myself a random user, I am not far off those anyway.
The treuNAS system told me that there is a fresh upgrade I shall apply, so I did... stupid me! This bloody upgrade, f-ed up my NAS for good. I spent several night trying to rescue the system, and failed doing so.
At the end, I was giving up. I booted Linux-Mint and was glad to see all my zpool drives lined up.
After installing Linux-Mint on my (non-zfs), boot drive I was able to install zfs-tools on my server. With the help of the zfs-tools I was able to import my zpool to the present Linux installation.
I am happy to report that all my ZFS data us save. I was even able to successfully run a SCRUB on the RAID, resulting in 0 errors. May data is hence safe.
However. All the elegant management provided to trueNAS is gone.
Is there a conclusion we can take from my experience? I am not sure. It is a gamble to trust one of the other flavour of provider. BACKUP on your own media and format.
Maybe it is better to setup your very own NFS-server and ignore all the other solution available for convenience.
