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Replacing the external backup drive on my home server

A couple of years ago (OK, maybe more like 3 years ago), I bought a Seagate 8TB external USB disk that I added to my server for semi-offline backups. I formatted it with ZFS with neither mirroring, nor RAID, and put in place a script every Sunday night that copied the entire content of the server onto the external drive using 'rsync' in case my server had a catastrophic failure even though the 4 drives are in a RAID5 configuration.

This being said, the 8TB external Seagate drive got corrupted this week, and so I just threw it away and bought a new one.

As a reminder, here's what I did to install it in my server:

1) I disconnected the bad drive

2) I destroyed the datasink zpool

% zpool destroy -f datasink

3) I rebooted and connected the new drive (which ended up as da0), and then:

% gpart create -s gpt da0 % gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -a4k -l seagate8TB da0 % gnop create -S 4k /dev/gpt/seagte8TB % zpool create -f -m none datasink gpt/seagate8TB.nop % zpool export datasink % gnop destroy gpt/seagate8TB.nop % zpool import -d /dev/gpt datasink % zpool status % zfs set mountpoint=/localbackup datasink

and, to check if the drive is setup properly for 4k blocks:

% zdb | grep ashift

it should be set to 12.

I then ran my local backup procedure, and it copied the content of the server onto the external USB drive in about 12 hours.

Crisis averted.

P.S. I probably ought to mention that I take a snapshot of my ZFS partitions every hour and keep (some of) them around for a couple of years. That's a nice feature of ZFS!

/FreeBSD | Posted at 21:35 | permanent link