Advice on Switching From Unraid to Hexos

[EnderDeath]

So this might be a weird question, but I figured I’d ask anyway because I’m kinda stuck.

I’m currently using Unraid with a few hard drives and SSDs, and I want to move to Hexos as soon its possible. The problem is, that I have so much data and all these container configurations, and I have no idea how to move everything over without breaking stuff.

The only plan I’ve come up with (and yeah, it’s probably terrible) is:

1. Take out my parity drive (the one Unraid uses for redundancy), plug it into my PC, and wipe it.

2. Use that wiped parity drive to set up Hexos as the base for the new system.

3. Dual-boot Unraid and Hexos (if that’s even a thing).

4. Manually copy data from the Unraid drives to Hexos through my PC. Like, I’d move all the data off one drive, reformat it for Hexos, then add it to the Hexos
system. Repeat until all the drives are moved over.

It feels clunky and like a ton of work, but it’s the only way I can think of. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but for the life of me, I can’t figure it out.

If anyone has ideas—or even just wants to tell me why this is a horrible idea—I’m all ears. Thanks!

[Midnight2ss]

I'm not sure if this would work if your drives are in a RAID, but I'm not a developer so I could be wrong. Depending on how much data you have it may be best to move it to like an external drive and move it from there but 🤷‍♀️. I'd also be interested as its based on True NAS so if your running ZFS there MAY be an options to import the ZFS pool.

Edited November 29, 2024 by Midnight2ss

[ibis]

I am also interested in this. When moving from my Synology to Unraid a few years ago I had to built the Unraid system with extra drives move everything across then add in the old drives from the Synology. 

I'm not really keen to do this again mostly because I don't have the spare drives. 

I'm interested to know how the migration process might work before I spend the money on a lifetime licence 

[includenull]

It all depends on how HexOS handles expansion, I don't think it's going to be like Unraid where you can just add a new drive to an existing array whenever since it's based on TrueNAS and you can't do that there. This is the main reason I use Unraid now over TrueNAS.

[jonp]

Actually....

You can add one drive at a time to expand!  They have to be the same size as the drives you already have in a pool, but you can expand like that. 

[includenull]

Just now, jonp said:

Actually....

You can add one drive at a time to expand!  They have to be the same size as the drives you already have in a pool, but you can expand like that. 

I was just editing my reply to reflect that, I just read in the FAQ.

Seems I am out of touch with what you can do with TrueNAS and zfs now.

For @EnderDeath: you need a minimum of three drives to create the pool according to the FAQ.

[jonp]

5 minutes ago, includenull said:

I was just editing my reply to reflect that, I just read in the FAQ.

Seems I am out of touch with what you can do with TrueNAS and zfs now.

For @EnderDeath: you need a minimum of three drives to create the pool according to the FAQ.

Raidz expansion is the feature to search about. It's really amazing!!