Since I had a old windows laptop as a plex and file server for years I thought it would be good to try something new. After researching options I ddecided to try FreeNAS. Since it has ZFS and I’m an old Sun guy - why not. Well…. After a few weeks I decided to abandon FreeNAS and roll my own using a ThinkCentre M93p Tiny. I’ll try to post some notes on how the build goes.
So I ran into a few issues using the dd image backup I referenced prior Raspberry Pi 3 SDCard backup The Image is very large even though the data was not. For example on a 32GB SD card I was getting a 12GB file. I only have 3GB of data! so that was a bummer. When it comes time to recover, I have to expand the gz image file to a full 32GB to then image it onto another SD device. There’s tricks around this I’m sure but still. Since dd was reading 100% of the SD card (/dev/mmcblk0) even with compression it took a LONG time to create the image. 20 minutes or so. Since I’m backing up a live system this was a real issue. I did manage to figure out how to create a partial image if your partition sizes were smaller than the actual device - This seemed to work but it still was storing 6.6GB of data which was over double what I actually had: ...
Warning: Nerd Content ahead...
I published my Sun Cheatsheet document to the world recently. It’s a compilation of Sun commands and processes that I documented over the years. Enjoy! http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhjhzg6x_3c6d658