Migrating from TrueNAS Core to TrueNAS Scale

I previously installed TrueNAS Core on my Dell Poweredge R720 server as a virtual machine under Proxmox. However, TrueNAS Core uses FreeBSD, which is an operating system that I am not really familiar with. Then, on February 22, 2022, TrueNAS Scale was officially released. It is based on Linux, and I wanted to migrate over from Core to Scale. But at that time, the migration path required me to download the Scale ISO, boot up the installer, and choose the upgrade option. I was really worried it would mess up my NAS, even though it is a VM and I can easily just roll back to a previous snapshot.

Then, I found that there is actually another way to migrate from Core to Scale within the UI itself.

Basically, when you go to the TrueNAS Scale download page, there is an option to get the manual update file.

Click on that option to open up the links to download the file (which was 1.3 GB) and also read the notes.

The notes basically contains the same instructions as the forum post, which says:

I chose the "Install manual update file" option, saved the current configuration (remember to apply the option to "include password secret seed"), chose the temporary storage location, then browsed to select the manual update file which I downloaded. When choosing the temporary storage location, I chose to use my mainpool instead of "Memory Device" since I am not sure if the file needs to be persistent between boots.

Then, after choosing "Apply update", the migration process started. It rebooted a few times (I think three boots) before finally booting up into TrueNAS Scale with the web UI active.

Jails are not migrated, though, so I will need to manually set up my Nextcloud instance again. Not really an issue since I haven't really used Nextcloud after installing the jail. 😅

The migration seems to have gone smoothly, and boot time from cold start to launch of web UI was around 65 seconds. Kind of happy since it is Linux, an OS that I am much more familiar with. 😊 Kudos to the TrueNAS team for coming up with a way to make migration so much easier. 

(All that remains to is reinstall Nextcloud...)

Update May 13, 2022: I installed the TrueCharts catalog thinking to install Nextcloud through that, but it didn't really work out for me. And the catalog is huge, which ended up consuming a lot of CPU power whenever it updates the catalog. Like 100% CPU load, even though it is only for around 10 to 15 seconds each time. But that is enough to cause the R720's fans to rev up a bit... In the end, I uninstalled the TrueCharts catalog. Guess I will find another way to install Nextcloud.