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Upgrade / Backup / Restore Pro6 and 316
Hi team,
So i managed to find myself a brand new 316 ReadyNAS..
I have an existing Pro6 with 6 x 3TB disks installed with XRAID-2: but I made it so that 3 are used for capacity and the other 3 are used as redundancy (so I have only 8326 GB total storage).
What I want to do is take out the 3 redundancy drives, install them in the 316, then copy all my data from the Pro6 to the 316.
Once I've done that; do a full reinstall of the Pro6 NAS and then only use 1 HDD as redundancy (instead of 3) and afterwards put all the data back onto the Pro6 and put the 3 HDDs back into the Pro6 from the 316.
Can I do this without loosing all my data / killing my volume?
- D
dejhon wrote:
I have taken out 2 of the disks already and the NAS has told me that the volume is currently unprotected..
Looks like you did that before you captured mdconfig. A bit risky, if it had been in RAID-10 you could have killed your volume.
However, the RAID mode is 6, so you didn't have triple redundancy (and that is confirmed by the NAS telling you the volume is unprotected).
The sector count on md2 looks low - is there an md3? What disks are you using?
As far as next steps, I suggest putting the two removed drives temporarily into the RN316 as jbod (using flexraid). The simplest way is to put one in first, do the factory install, switch to flexraid, then hot-insert the second. You should then be able to create a second volume. If you have any unused disks, you could try adding them in as additional jbod volumes.
Make sure snapshots are off and bitrot protection are turned off for each share, and migrate as much data as you can. Keep fullness below 90% If everything doesn't fit, you will need to store the rest on a PC or external drives.
When all is copied, reset the pro, use normal xraid, and copy back from each jbod volume (leaving the original install disk for last). Then hot-insert the two removed drives (one at a time, waiting for expansion to complete).
If you have interest in expanding the pro later on, you can look into switching it over to OS6 now. Since you are resetting anyway, it is the right time to switch (if you want to). It is unsupported by Netgear, but it would allow expansion to larger drives later on.
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You are using flexraid with 3 RAID-1 volumes? Or something else?
In general, your procedure will work if the remaining disks are healthy, and do not fail during the data transfer to the RN314. Making a backup first would be best. It would also be a good idea to do a volume scrub on all volumes in the pro6 before removing any disks. That is a pretty effective disk diagnostic (all sectors of all drives being read).
- I am using xraid2, but just chose to use 3 as redundancy which I now know what pointless
Hello,
I understand from your answer that you have a single RAID 1 volume with 6 disks. So basically your proposed setup could work. However, I would advise against doing so you.
You also need to consider the following points:
- How do you know which disks are the mirrored ones, i.e. how can you prevent from pulling the data disk and its mirror?
- Assuming you want redundancy in your ReadyNAS RN316. Since you are unhappy with RAID 1, you will most likely have RAID 5. When you put the three disks in the RN316 and choose RAID 5, you will only have the disk space of two disks to work with. Assuming the volume in your Pro is rather full this will not be enough space to copy all the data.
- Assuming you have no backup. By pulling disks from the Pro you are reducing redundancy. If a disk from your Pro fails during the copy operation then you will lose data.
My advice would be to use the Pro as a backup of your data. That means buying new disks for the RN316.
Bye,
Eskender
EskenderNG wrote:
I understand from your answer that you have a single RAID 1 volume with 6 disks. So basically your proposed setup could work. However, I would advise against doing so you.
I think it has to be more complicated than that. Adding the first disk for redundancy would have given him RAID-6. I have no idea what the system would do when he added the second disk for redundancy. The pro-6 uses mdadm for raid, and that doesn't support triple-parity. I guess it could have gone to RAID-10???
I take your point that w/o knowing the raid mode it is hard to predict what will happen when disks are removed.
dejhon - From your first post, it seems that you want to end up with 6x3TB RAID-5 on the Pro, and that you want that volume to hold all your existing data.
But you haven't said where you want to end up on the RN316. Presumably it won't end up sitting empty. Maybe tell us that, and we can figure out a safer migration path.
Ok, with OS 6 you could add several disks at once to a RAID 1 array while maintaining a RAID 1 array using Flex-RAID. I made the wrong assumption that this would work on the Pro as well.
Thanks, Eskender
Depending on the amount of data to be backed up, a safer approach would be to purchase 1 to 3 drives for the 316 (depending on budget) and use these to 'swing' migrate the data to. No need to have all six drives purchased for the 316; just enough drives to hold your data for the migration. You could even set these up in RAID0 to begin with, and reformat once your Pro has been reinitialised and the data copied back to it.
Note also that if you were running 3x RAID1, pulling the three redundancy disks in the Pro and inserting them in the 316 would mean there would not be a requirement to copy data is it would already be present on the redundant . You may even be able to get away with adding a 3TB to each unit, reformatting as RAID5 and then copying the data from the other unit.
Having said that, my preference would be to not mess with the disks in the existing unit until you had a copy of your data elsewhere.
- Thank you for your help - everything went relatively smoothly.
I am just finishing restoring the last of the data baCk to the pro6 after saving half to my 316 with 2 of the HDDs in and a friends nas with 4TB of data.
Just regarding the transmission add-on: I copied the folders from the .transmission folder and copied it back to the new one and everything showed up included transfer amounts etc. awesome!
The only question I have: is there a way to append or change the save location?
Previously they were saved in "/media/Movies" for example but the new nas wants "/Volume1/media/Movies"
Any advice on this?
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