Copy out to USB based 2TB drive

chrisjx

chrisjx

I use FreeNAS to back up all my home PCs, virtuals, etc on FreeNAS.

I'm trying to find a way to copy an entire volume for transporting the state of my backup on a 2TB drive to an offsite location.

I created a USB 2TB drive formatted as FAT32 and got it mounted. By running df -h I can see it as:

/dev/da1p1 - 1.8T 124G 1.7T 7% /mnt/sancho

All good except I get errors about files being too big when it comes to backing up my 40GB virtual VMs. I thought FAT32 was fairly generic. I suspect it has to do with the FAT32 drive limitations.

Who you gotta know (what format do I need) to just backup a drive so I can take it to my relative's home at Christmas? I'd like to be able to read it back on some generic linux distro (mac/windows not important).

Thanks for any tips,
Chris.
 
How about you format it UFS2 native and just use a FreeBSD install or LiveCD-DVD for offshore.. It is a worthy filesystem.

GhostBSD and PC-BSD both work in GUI mode as a LiveDVD with UFS support.
 
Fat32 has a filesize limit of 4GB.
I think ext3 is fairly well supported by FreeBSD?, which if so is probably the easiest option for FreeBSD/Linux compat.

You could also create a zpool on the disk and using ZFS-on-Linux although that would obviously need installing on the Linux machine you want to access the files on, and ZFS can be a bit flaky with USB disks.
 
Reading on the topic it appears UFS2 supports up to 16 Terabyte Volumes and 1023 GB max single file size.
That said I would break it down some. Maybe different partitions for the big stuff you won't use and FAT32 for things you may be sharing.
That way in case your magic FreeBSD LiveCD won't boot off xyz hardware offsite -at least Linux ect. could read the FAT32 stuff. I would add DragonFly Live to the UFS away kit too. Advanced testing should be easy enough and I would test it before leaving.
 
Linux is capable of reading UFS. Writing to UFS is not supported by default, but it sounds like you don't need that. I don't know if Linux supports soft-updates, journaling, or if that even matters when writing isn't supported. On Linux mount with e.g. mount -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sdc /mnt
 
chrbr said:
One option could be to split(1) the big files into small pieces.
Click to expand...
That is a good point. If you only have huge files, they can be difficult to manage, needing large media to copy or restore. I sometimes split backup files into 1490M pieces, so three will fit on a DVD. It is also smaller than the 2G limit on FAT filesystems.
 
While you're at it you can use p7zip and save some space, also don't forget that FUSE might be useful when using foreign filesystems.
 
Wow. Thanks to everybody.

I tried hooking up and mounting FAT32 (file size limits), ext4 (not compatible), ext3 (just about right) into the FreeNAS environment. Just seemed too complicated for me.

Code: 
Dec  8 20:17:19 freenas kernel: g_vfs_done():da1p1[READ(offset=-1051190902784, length=4096)]error = 5

Finally formatted as ext3 with gparted, hooked the USB 2TB drive to a little Dell (Wyse) NO3D mini pc running Ubuntu 14.04, and did an scp from my FreeNAS. And it's chugging away, one giant VM at a time.

Code: 
sudo scp -r root@freenas:/mnt/firstpool/* firstpool

Thanks for all your help,
Chris.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
As far as portability goes ExFAT is far better than the EXT*. Windows (7+, XP needs an update) and OS X does it natively, Linux have support both using FUSE and/or kernel module. FreeBSD also has support using FUSE but the port is a bit behind current versions...
//Danne
 
Use ZFS. ;) It's accessible from FreeBSD, Linux, illumos-derived OSes, etc. Unless you need to access it from Windows, ZFS is the way to go. ;)
 
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