I then got frustrated and ordered ten 8GB USB thumb drives from Newegg and downloaded LiveUSB (I know, somewhat unrelated but I was frustrated!). Since they are coming from China I couldn't wait so I looked around my desk and found three thumb drives - one is a) USB 2.0 2GB, another is b) USB 2.0 2GB encrypted and the last is c) USB 1.0 1GB. I couldn't reformat any in the past but I decided to be persistent. After much trial and tribulation I found not doing quick formats in FAT would reformat them. I didn't know what hassles the encrypted thumb drive b) would cause so I didn't use it. I kept the old NAS4Free thumb drive just in case I had to go back to the old, working NAS4Free version (.1349) and chose a) for the destination and c) to install liveUSB on. Using Win32 Image Writer I crammed about 970MB of LiveUSB into the 1GB thumb drive, no worries.
I rebooted the NAS with c) and (slowly, its only USB 1.0) got to the main menu and selected 9). Of course I had to make it tough - when a) didn't show up on the source list of USB thumb drives detected, I had to insert-reinsert a) many times to finally understand what SOURCE means. *Sigh!* After that I selected the CORRECT source (c)) and destination (a)) thumb drives and NAS4Free embedded was put on a).
I rebooted to factory defaults and then tried to import my "old" config file which was gzipped (extension .gz). It didn't work! I had a tiny moment of panic but fortunately I am not too thick and had saved my previous config file in both .gz and .xml format. Of course I prefer to having all the config files encrypted (I encrypt everything, in each NAS are 11 HDDs and all are encrypted) but it is not recognized. However the .xml config file worked and final reboot has brought me up and up-to-date. I did find out later I could retrieve the .xml config file from the gzipped config file with the admin password but I thought that was a description of what NAS4Free was doing when it imported a .gz config file.
So some concerns and hoping for resolution:
- Config file in the .gz format did not import. If you mean the import config function only imports .xml files, then it should be mentioned in NAS4Free as such.
- What does swap do? It doesn't take from system memory (I only have 2GB and ~250MB is used for the virtual HDD NAS4Free is installed on, thus in the status screen system memory shows about ~1750MB) but appears to reside on the thumb drive (says da0s2b). I assume it does the same function as the Windows swap file so that's a lot of writes and I thought we should minimize flash drive writes.
- A data drive was also mentioned after the creation of the embedded NAS4Free USB thumb drive. It also is on the flash device (I think device da0, part 3 is). Is this used with any frequency? If so, why?
- For the last two concerns above I can use my currently unused 11th HDD (an old WD in both systems) for swap and data, I prefer not to use finite flash drives for that. Even though it is encrypted I have enabled the boot option in geli so all of my encrypted HDDs are accessible by the NAS4Free while booting. Can't I change swap and data to a device made for frequent access?
- Actually I have used swap and data in the past and have seen zero improvement so I'm still wondering the need to change from the earlier, comfortable, embedded scenario to the liveCD-full-install-to-get-embedded hassle just to enable swap and data when they are no help that I can see. Wondering minds wish to know.
