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Migrating from 10.11 (1.7.2) to 10.13 (1.9.4)

PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2020 2:10 pm
by Tsur
My Mac that was running 10.11 with ZFS 1.7.2 has suddenly died. Luckily, the drives I was using for my one zpool seem to be okay, and I have a fairly recent Time Machine backup of the boot drive. I also have another Mac ready to takes its place with a clean install of 10.13. I went ahead and download the 1.9.4 DMG and installed the appropriate High Sierra package. But before going any further, I thought I'd pause and ask the community what the best path going forward.

Should I be restoring certain files from my TM backup? Or should I start fresh from the installation guide:
https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Install
What's the best way of ensuring my new install recognizes and uses my old zpool?

edit:
All the data is safely backed up. If I had to to, I could start completely from scratch and copy the data over to a new zpool. But I'd MUCH prefer to avoid that scenario.

Re: Migrating from 10.11 (1.7.2) to 10.13 (1.9.4)

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2020 12:13 am
by nodarkthings
AFAIK, your old pools will be used safely by v1.9.4, no need to dig into TM except if you've got data there to recover, but it has nothing to do with ZFS.
- You might want to make a scrub to check your pools health.
- Once you see everything's running fine, you upgrade your pools if you don't plan to use them on an older version any more.
I've stayed a few years with 1.7.2 on 10.9 and updated to 1.9.0 on 10.11 (then all subsequent versions), I guess you shouldn't have any weird surprise in your situation... :mrgreen: (I also have a 10.13 test partition where my pools are used without a glitch)

Re: Migrating from 10.11 (1.7.2) to 10.13 (1.9.4)

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2020 8:54 am
by Tsur
You were right.
1.9.4 recognized my 1.7.2 pools without issue. I went ahead and upgraded them. This was the least painful part of my old Mac dying. Thanks very much for your insight.

Re: Migrating from 10.11 (1.7.2) to 10.13 (1.9.4)

PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2020 9:36 am
by nodarkthings
My pleasure. ;)