# Data cloning !!



## shahzaib (Jul 5, 2016)

Hi,

We've encounter a very critical Dell-r510 server failure, its motherboard got completely damaged and there's no way to boot the machine. Now to make our data online asap, we need to have this data available in other machine but need your instructions for this sensitive migration. Let me provide you a bit structure overview of our server which we call 'storage server' due to 12TB capacity. Storage node is made up of:

1 x SSD (this primary ssd is mounted in motherboard and contains FreeBSD OS installation)
12 x 3TB SATA (Raid10 backed with Perc H200 controller which is flashed into IT mode to form HBA Lsi-9211 controller). So all disks are directly accessed to FreeBSD and data is directly written to raw disks.

1- Now to migrate data, we've HPDL180 G6 server available. Now what if we simply move OS SSD in HP server motherboard and move the controller & 12 x 3TB SATA in bay drives of HP, should it boot without any issue?

2- Or do we need to clone each disk using some software and then put all cloned disks into new HP server ? will that work ? According to me, if we clone all 12 disks , we'll also need to have them in Raid10 to have proper data consistency.

Please advise what to do?


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## tingo (Jul 5, 2016)

Try it. If it works, you have saved yourself some time. If it don't work, you can look at other options.


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## shahzaib (Jul 5, 2016)

Thanks for quick help. Well for option 2, let me go into bit more details:

If we clone each disk and then put 12 x 3TB cloned disks into new server, will we be also need to form Raid10 as all data was structured over Raid10 setup ? So this is what we're gonna do when choosing option-2?

- Clone each disk
- put cloned 12x3tb disks into new server with freebsd on it
- form Raid10 using zpool create storage & all data will be mounted

Also, can you let me know some tool for disk cloning.  Clonezilla is a disk cloning tool but don't know if it would be useful in our case.


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## tingo (Jul 5, 2016)

I realize that my answer was unprecise.
When I wrote "try it" I was referring to this option:



> 1- Now to migrate data, we've HPDL180 G6 server available. Now what if we simply move OS SSD in HP server motherboard and move the controller & 12 x 3TB SATA in bay drives of HP, should it boot without any issue ?


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## shahzaib (Jul 5, 2016)

Yep i know, but its better to have pure understanding for option-2 as well in case 1st doesn't work.


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## wblock@ (Jul 5, 2016)

ZFS is no problem, it has metadata that will be automatically detected on the drives.  The SSD boot should also be fine.  You might need to edit /etc/fstab for device names, or adjust the names or numbers of Ethernet interfaces in /etc/rc.conf.

But yes, it _should_ work.  I would not try it without a backup.

As far as cloning those drives, Clonezilla will do it, but it is unlikely to recognize ZFS and so might just copy the entire drive, effectively the same as using dd(1).  Other drive cloning tools will probably do the same.  If you use dd(1) directly, give it a larger buffer size like bs=128k to speed up the copy.  Copying drives this way is always dangerous, it is way too easy to get the source and target mixed up.


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## chrbr (Jul 5, 2016)

wblock@ said:


> As far as cloning those drives, Clonezilla will do it, but it is unlikely to recognize ZFS


If Clonezilla would recognize ZFS I am not sure if it could be trusted. There are many issues and discussions with respect to differences in the implementation of ZFS of Linux and FreeBSD. Dear shahzaib, this is just my thinking or concern. My knowledge about ZFS is limited. If you are in doubt trust others. I wish you success!


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