CRITICAL! Need help with extracting data from what seems to be a failing FreeNAS box.

[ANNIHILATOR284]

So here's the deal and before you tell me anything i know the risk i took while picking out this configuration  but the money was tight. i have a FreeNAS box wiht 4TB of storage (2x 2TB ZFS pools) with it's primary function of being a PLEX server. i'm running it on an i3-4150, gigabyte H81M-S mitx motherboard and 16Gb(2x8gb) of DDR3 (corsair vengeance) RAM.

 

since about 5-6 months there was an issue where the NAS box woulg just freeze! go off the network grid, unresponsive, if there are any transfers going on would stop mid way yet the drives would still be spinning and all the lights and stuff would be acting normal. times comes and i buy a 6TB WD red hoping to move all the data onto this and run the 2Tb drives on raid 1 to finally get some redundancy game on. I mount the HDD onto my windows machine, boot my nas box up after a week of down time fearing another "crash" about 20GB down it's freezes up again. i was hoping to get all data out and reinstall everything hoping it would all be fixed. now it's not feasible to get 20gb out, wait for 24hrs for it to start responding again ( no turning it off and on again does not help, you HAVE to give it a good 24 hrs irrespective of the number of restarts for it to respond) and get another 20gb out. it would take me years before i can get it all out. 

 

Is there anyways i can mount the drives on my windows machine it self (the 2 2Tb pools) and get the data out and safe?

 

I'M DESPERATE!!! and not the forget DUMB for taking this risk.

[ANNIHILATOR284]

Just now, Name Taken said:

Don't transfer over the network so either connect the 6TB HDD to the NAS or the NAS drives to your desktop. Connecting the NAS will be easier as FreeNAS supports NTFS so it should be a simple copy/paste.

that would've been my first option but unfortunately i cannot predict when the thing will hang up on me again. and to connect the drives onto my windows machine, windows does not natively support zfs and i doubt it will detect the Z-pools either. thank you!

[ANNIHILATOR284]

Just now, Name Taken said:

Boot a Linux or FreeBSD live CD on your desktop to do the copy.

Guide me My Lord! oh holy noodle!

[ANNIHILATOR284]

1 minute ago, Name Taken said:

For FreeBSD, drop to the shell, import the zpool, mount the NTFS drive, run copy.
For Linux, Ubuntu is the easiest option as it has binary ZFS kernel modules in its repos then same as above.

alrighty! i'll get back to you with the results ASAP (which in my case is a couple days) GAWD i love this forum #insta_results