Upgrade instructions - uninstall / reinstall??

[_max_]

I've read through the wiki and searched this board, but I cannot find specific instructions on upgrading from one version to the next for an official release.

Do you export all, un-install then re-install? Or can you just export, open the new version dmg and install over the old version??

Many thanks.

[nodarkthings]

Hi!
You're right, there's no instruction.
I've discovered that, since a few versions, all you have to do is:
- export all
- run the new installer. If a former version is already installed, it will uninstall it. You might get an error message.
- reboot
- run the new installer. This time it will work.
- reboot, just to be on the safe side.

So, if you want to uninstall your current version without installing another one, just run the installer once.
I find this behaviour quite clever, it would just need to be specified somewhere...

[nodarkthings]

Note that this works also when downgrading to another v2: I recently came back to 2.1.0 after running 2.2.3 for a while, just using the 2.1.0 installer. I guess it will work the same as long as there's no additional element installed by a future version.
You can check where things are installed from this screen capture:

Uninstall v2.png (5.15 KiB) Viewed 20838 times

EDIT: strange enough, on another drive I upgraded from 2.2.2 to 2.2.3 without the installer uninstalling 2.2.2 as a first stroke, like it does on my main system... So take all that with a bit of salt, things might apparently defer slightly sometimes for whatever reason...

[Haravikk]

Note that this works also when downgrading to another v2: I recently came back to 2.1.0 after running 2.2.3 for a while, just using the 2.1.0 installer. I guess it will work the same as long as there's no additional element installed by a future version.
You can check where things are installed from this screen capture:

Uninstall v2.png

Just wanted to add to this, but when trying a new version of ZFS don't run zpool upgrade until you're sure you're happy with it – if you upgrade a pool and then decide you want to downgrade the ZFS version, you may find the pool is either unusable or will be read-only, due to missing features. While upgrades are intended to be safe (features that aren't backwards compatible shouldn't activate automatically), that hasn't always been the case, so it's better to be safe than sorry!

Personally I don't run zpool upgrade until I've been running a new version for at least a month (usually longer, because I'm forgetful and have terrible time management ).

[nodarkthings]

Just wanted to add to this, but when trying a new version of ZFS don't run zpool upgrade until you're sure you're happy with it – if you upgrade a pool and then decide you want to downgrade the ZFS version, you may find the pool is either unusable or will be read-only, due to missing features. While upgrades are intended to be safe (features that aren't backwards compatible shouldn't activate automatically), that hasn't always been the case, so it's better to be safe than sorry!

Personally I don't run zpool upgrade until I've been running a new version for at least a month (usually longer, because I'm forgetful and have terrible time management ).

You're absolutely right! I forgot to mention this.
Actually, I haven't upgraded my oldest pool since v1. For my use case, the only worthy improvement in v2 is the ZSTD compression feature, very efficient for some contents (VMs and sparsebundles, for example) but quite useless for others (data already compressed such as dmg, iso, mp3, zip, etc.)

[tangles]

I just did a fresh install of oc-macOS on an TrashCan and then installed ZFS via brew.

I saw the word ZEVO in brew’s output which freaked me out at first but seems not related to installing the latest and correct architecture by the looks.
Required a restart and all working as expected.

Will be interesting to see what happens when the brew repository is updated for the next release…