Dan [the] Salmon

If you run ZFS like I do (and I think you should) there will probably come at time when you need to migrate a dataset from one volume to another. This was done in FreeNAS (FreeBSD), but the steps should apply to any *nix system with ZFS

The great thing about ZFS is that we can do most of this migration with our services and everything still running.

We’ll start by taking a snapshot of the dataset we want to move.

zfs snapshot oldpool/mydataset@snapshot1

Then we’ll copy over the dataset to the new volume. If you have a large dataset you may want to run this command in a screen or tmux session. You can still use the old dataset while this is running.

zfs send oldpool/mydataset@snapshot1 | zfs receive newpool/mydataset

After this is done, turn off all jails and file shares that access the old volume. Then we take a second snapshot

zfs snapshot oldpool/mydataset@snapshot2

Now we can do an “incremental” send that will just copy over the difference between this snapshot and the first. Should be much quicker than the first send

zfs send -i oldpool/mydataset@snapshot1 oldpool/mydataset@snapshot2 | zfs receive newpool/mydataset

After this send is done, you should be good to go. Make sure to point your file shares and jail storage sources to the new location. Because we used zfs send, all the permissions and metadata will be the exact same on the other end.