itimpi

This behaviour is documented here in the Caution in the online documentation accessible via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI or the DOCS link at the top of each forum page. you need to use a copy/delete strategy for moving files to avoid this. If you use the Dynamix File Manager plugin to move files it will do this automatically.

Depends on your usage pattern. The normal recommendation is that it should be more than the largest file you expect to write, and going for twice that gives a bit of headroom.

Normally if you have a share of a given name then all top level folders of that name on any pool or array drive are combined to give a single unified view under /mnt/user. Doing an rsync between a user share (anything under /mnt/user) and a drive share (which is what /mnt/backup_hdd is) can easily lead to data loss unless you are very careful and know what you are doing. Have you read the section of the online documentation that discusses User Shares and how they are implemented?

@RobertP @SuperMario86 I have just pushed an update to the plugin that should stop you getting spurious notifications about an Unclean shutdown having occurred. I would welcome confirmation from your end that it has fixed the issue you were seeing.

That share has a Minimum Free Space setting of around 781GB, and none of your drives has that much free space.

You can plug in removable drives AFTER the array has been started as the licence limit applies to the drives that are plugged in at the point the array is starting. Since you do not mention whether drives connected via USB are permanently attached or not cannot know if you will be affected.

If you Google for ‘xfs’ and ‘Mac’ then there appear to be several options available. Not tried them myself but I have used the Paragon drivers on Windows to read xfs formatted drives, although it looks like there are other free options now available for use on macOS. The other option I see mentioned is to run up a Linux VM under macOS as Linux has built-in support for xfs.

What format did you use for the Unraid drives? Each drive in Unraid is a free-standing file system, so if you have appropriate drivers on the Mac they can then easily be mounted and read.

I would avoid those where the wires go vertically into a moulded SATA connector as those are the most likely to have manufacturing flaws that can lead to fire hazards. You are better off getting ones that are molex->SATA and have this sort of form factor. They come with varying numbers of SATA connectors - probably the 4-way being the most commonly used.

In which case look for the SpaceInvader One videos on Youtube that cover most aspects of Unraid.

If you boot in non-gui mode do you get a login prompt? If so you could try logging in and issuing the 'diagnostics' command which will write the diagnostics zip file to the logs folder on the flash drive which you could then post here to see if we can spot anything.

Just had a quick look at the code and it appears that there IS a check on whether the array is already started so unless that check is faulty in some way the backup process will not run without the array started.

@RobertP Thanks for those logs. I can now see why you get the spurious Unclean shutdown notification although I will have to work out why I was not getting it in my test environment. It is a side-effect of a change I made to delay the Unclean shutdown message until the array is actually starting and the change is obviously not quite right. I will work out the fix and release an update ASAP, although it is likely to be tomorrow before it is ready.

I have not checked the code, but I would expect the appdata backup plugin to include a check on whether the array is started.

Could you enable the testing mode of logging in the plugin, recreate the error; and then post diagnostics taken after that. Hopefully with that I can work out why you are getting the message and issue a correction.

Are you sure the SMART error indicates a disk problem? Some errors (e.g. CRC errors) are nothing to do with the drive having a problem but are due to external factors.

Not sure if it stops you later putting an existing full licence on the drive. I suspect you would be OK but I am not sure. If all you are trying is to do is see if they boot why bother to get a Trial licence in the first place? That way you can still later get a Trial licence for that drive if you decide it would be convenient.

All I can suggest is to post the diagnostics zip file from both systems to see if we can spot a difference in the way they are set up.

You can add parity drives and extra data drives at any time (up to your licence limit). The only rule is that no data drive can be larger than the smallest parity drive. The number of parity drives determines how many simultaneous drive failures you can handle. Unraid will NOT protect you against accidentally adding the old NTFS formatted drives to the array. However if you install the Unassigned Devices plugin you will be able to mount them outside the array. This should both stop you accidentally adding them to the array and also make it easier to copy their data onto the array once you have set it up. Note that it is intended in the future you can have multiple 'Unraid' type arrays but this is still quite a way off so not something that can be used in the short term.

Nothing in the syslog around any of those periods except for the fact that there appears to be no activity in the log for some time after the times you give as well. No idea therefore what might be causing the symptoms you describe.

If you wanted the files on the cache then the mover should have been set to array->cache.

You should refer to the current documentation that covers that here.

Not sure I understand your question? If you have a paid-for legacy licence then this is valid for all current and future Unraid releases.

Have you tried adding it to the /etc/profile file?

If you want to preclear them you first have to delete any partitions making it a two step process for drives which already contain a file system. This limit it imposed to avoid accidentally clicking preclear and losing valuable data. As you said the pre-clear is an optional (3rd party) feature - if necessary Unraid will clear any drive when it is added to the array. You mention them having data on them but I presume you are happy for it to be wiped during the add by the Clear process?