Moving physical discs

[bramblyBush]

I am playing around with ZFS trying to get my head around it. I guess I've gotten too used to traditional file systems, too used to knowing MY DATA IS RIGHT HERE and I can plug it into any computer and show it to you!

I have my NAS4Free running on a flash stick on a laptop, with one external HDD on ZFS and it's working great. Everything has been pretty easy so far. But suppose I needed to detach a HDD physically to clean it or to move my server. How do you go about doing that without ruining everything, especially if it's part of a pool? I found an "offline" command but it won't execute. The docs talk about adding but not removing that I could find.

Also side question: if I wanted an offsite backup HDD that was formatted to work with common OS's, so NTFS or FAT, is there a way to do that using only the server without going through networks, or do I have to access the shared files through my windows computer and transfer them that way?

[kenZ71]

N4F supports hot swap so you can pull a drive with the machine running. Although I prefer to power down then swap out the drive.

You could take a ZFS drive over to a linux, freeBSD, Solaris or any other OS that supports ZFS and read your data.

[b0ssman]

some points here.

using laptops and usb drives are not recommended with nas4free.

also using ntfs and fat is only a workaround if you have no other option to move data from those drives. it is not meant to be used normally.

[chrisf4lc0n]

Also side question: if I wanted an offsite backup HDD that was formatted to work with common OS's, so NTFS or FAT, is there a way to do that using only the server without going through networks, or do I have to access the shared files through my windows computer and transfer them that way?

You could use rsync should do it for you... Just go to local tab and set everything up, the only problem with rsync I have found ist that it does not support non standard signs...