Replication on FreeNAS only partially completing

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

Hi guys,

I’m currently in the process of rebuilding my primary NAS and I want to create a backup of everything from that server to another FreeNAS server. Both are running 11.3 (Release).

I don’t currently use snapshots or replication tasks so both of those are empty.

When I go to set up a replication task, I make sure that both the “Recursive” and “Replicate from scratch if incremental is not possible”, however each time I’m getting an incomplete replication (even though the status is complete). I’m also running the task as root so it has full access to all folders.

Out of the whole 9.41 TB (used) dataset, only about 1.1 TB actually copies over to the backup NAS.

Any ideas why most of my data is missing?

2

Replication requires snapshots. If you don’t use snapshots, then I’d just go with rsync. If you have ssh set up between the two machines, something like the following should work.
sudo rsync -avP /pool/src-dataset/ root@backup:/pool/dest-dataset

3

When creating the replication task, it seems to automatically create a corresponding snapshot task as well.

The problem with using rsync is that it’s much slower. Replication maxes out my 1Gbps link (between 110-120 MB/sec) where as rsync sits at around 5 MB/sec. At that rate, it would take several weeks to copy data over initially.