These are internal drives connected to a desktop PSU wired to a USB interface to connect to the laptop.

Haha, yeah. It does make me wonder whether I should bin the whole TrueNAS approach entirely. It seems like a tremendous faff when I could just have the files mirrored to another disk as a backup.

The hard disks are on a separate power supply. The TrueNAS software is running on an old laptop so it effectively has UPS protection.

Yeah, another vote for Caddy. I’ve run nginx as a reverse proxy before and it wasn’t too bad, but Caddy is even easier. Needs naff-all resources too. My ProxMox VM for it has 256 MB of RAM!

Which logs specifically should I be checking?

zpool doesn’t see any pools to import. The system does see the disks but I’m not sure why the disks aren’t being checked for pools.

I’ll give it a shot. I was asking here in case it was a common thing that everyone else knows about (i.e. “Oh you’re running TrueNAS without a UPS? That’s a non starter, everyone knows that”.

It seems to either be completely fine and a power cycle makes no difference - or it loses the whole structure. I don’t know how I’m supposed to pull the disks back in. It doesn’t seem to detect that they’re already setup as part of a pool.

The pool I’ve created doesn’t vanish but it seems my only option for it is “manage devices” which takes me to the “Add VDEVs to the Pool” menu where my three disks show up as unassigned. The only presented option seems to be to wipe them in order to add them back to the pool.

Trying to search for this stuff doesn’t seem to give me anything useful. I don’t know what the intended behaviour is and what it is that I’m doing wrong. I would expect what should happen is that the disks come back online and get automatically added back to the pool again but no, apparently not?