Maverick52

We're really not fully setup for redundant backups like I'd planned, but right now we have a Synology NAS that holds her photo archive along with the Unraid server holding a copy of the archive. More current photos are on her editing PC (and the camera cards for at least a little while) and are backed up to the cloud, so quite a bit of her archive is on the cloud as well. The plan was to implement another Unraid server like our current one to replace the Synology (as it's only a 2 bay NAS so it's limited for upgrading) and then have the 2nd server stored offsite. I don't mind helping her, but who knows how things will go in the future. I just figured I should find out if I can point her in a different direction if things change. As far as her learning goes, it's less about her willingness to learn and more about her ability to understand and retain it. She's a creative type, this stuff is a completely foreign language. My son is more like me though, so I suppose if worse came to worse he could handle things even if he has to google stuff or have me talk him through something.

This is a bit of an awkward question, but... I setup a Unraid server for my wife's photography business, she uses it to store her photo archive. We're beginning a separation and while I'm still willing to help if she had issues with her server, eventually she would need to be able to handle issues/hire someone to handle issues if she were to run into them. Is there any common, like Geeksquad or something, business that would be familiar enough with Unraid to help her out if she were to need it? edit: I guess I should add... The setup probably won't need to be adjusted moving forward, but right now the array is only made up a single parity drive and single data drive. As time goes on a hard drive would need to be added physically and through the Unraid UI. So other than some unforeseen issue this is basically the only thing I know that will need to happen in the future.

I currently have a Unraid server that I use for storing and accessing my photography. I don't work off of the server, it's really just storage and a NAS for accessing old completed work. I'm planning to build a second server that will serve as an off site backup, and that will be its only job. I'm thinking I will use a ASRock motherboard & CPU combo as a cost effective and low power solution for such a simple server, but I have two choices in CPU's. ASRock J4005M Intel Celeron Dual-Core Processor J4005 (up to 2.7 GHz) Micro ATX Motherboard / CPU Combo or ASRock J4105M Intel Celeron Quad-Core Processor J4105 (up to 2.5 GHz) Micro ATX Motherboard / CPU Combo Basically, the J4005 is dual core but has a slightly faster clock speed, and the J4105 is quad core with a slightly slower clock speed. Will there be any noticeable benefit between these two?

Thank you! Could you point me in the right direction of how somebody would accomplish this? I don't expect a tutorial or anything, just what I should be searching to learn about it.

This is really just a theoretical question, I have no need for doing this at the moment, but... Let's say the Unraid server I've built is maxed out on drives. Unraid maximum, hardware maximum, whatever, doesn't matter. The only purpose of this Unraid server is to function as a NAS, file storage is all. Users access shares from their Windows desktop. Let's say I need more space to store more files. Is it possible to build a second server and access that servers storage without it appearing to be a completely different server to the user? As in, could it be setup so that when a user accesses the share they're used to accessing the data on, the new servers data will show up in there just the same as the data from the original server.

I know this is a super old post, but since the thread has been somewhat refreshed anyways I just wanted to quote you and say thank you for solving the issue I was having with my HP Mediasmart and Unraid. Unraid was only seeing two drives in specific slots, after changing this in the BIOS it now sees all four perfectly. I picked up my old HP Mediasmart off Facebook, I figured it was worth a gamble for $80 and it came with 7 TB of HDD's and the video cable. Even with the super old hardware I think it's going to make a nice NAS for me.

Good to hear you're doing ok with 12TB on their service. This is from the email they sent me, which is what kind of makes me nervous of their service. "10TB in isolation shouldn't be unfeasible, so long as you adjust your configuration to be very different from the defaults, but it's also really quite a substantial quantity of data, and you'll be pushing the program. The other factor to consider is backup and restore times. We set a guideline of expecting 10GB to 30GB of uploads per day, after the first week or so. New archives can oftentimes get a good half terabyte or so into the cloud at a breakneck pace, but once a large amount of data has been uploaded, the overhead catches up with the upload process, and it settles into more normal rates. What this means is that it could take years to upload 10TB of data, and if you're using it specifically for an emergency in which your local storage is lost, destroyed, or damaged, that means that it could take a very, very long time to recover that 10TB. It's important to consider your backup strategy carefully. For such a large quantity of data, and the desire to use it only for emergencies, you'd likely have a better experience using a service designed for long-term archival storage of massive quantities of data, such as Amazon Glacier, or Google's Cloud Storage options."

I realize there is no official method and that they want you to use B2, I was just thinking there might be a work around. I know their Windows program wont pick up mapped network drives, but I wasn't sure if anyone else had tried other solutions. I know Crashplan has a docker to use and doesn't cost much more, but their customer support really made it sound like their service wouldn't be very good for large amounts of data (I was specifically inquiring about over 10 TB of data).

Is there a way to use Backblaze's "personal backup" plan with an unraid server? I know Crashplan can, but I don't feel very confident in their service after speaking with their customer support. They basically told me I should go elsewhere. edit: I think I should clarify the purpose of my unraid server and my needs. I'm a photographer so I have a decently large amount of data (and it's always growing) that is simply being stored and not changed frequently. My current workflow is to ingest my photos onto my workstations SSD, over the course of the next few days to weeks I'll perform the work I do to the photos, and then once I'm finished with the photos they'll stay on the SSD for awhile until I transfer them to my storage (which was a Synology NAS but is now a unraid server). All I'm looking for is a backup solution in case of failed drives or a natural disaster or something. If I can't use backblaze personal directly from the unraid server, I think I could still run it from my workstation and have it backup everything, but I thought it would be nice to just have it all done on the server side.

Might as well tack on a question to this post instead of making a new one... If I want to take data from my unraid array and burn that data to a DVD/Bluray, is there a plugin or docker that can help me with that?

Thanks guys. I think I'll just use "fill up" for now. I organize my photos by year>month>shoot and I think it makes most sense to try and keep them stored chronologically as I add them to the disks, and add disks to the system. If I've understood and setup the split levels and allocations correctly, then I shouldn't have any single shoot spanning across two or more disks.

So I've just got my build completed and I'm starting to setup unraid. The build is... Unraid OS: 6.8.3 CPU: Intel Core i5-3570 Motherboard: ASRock H77 Pro4/MVP ATX LGA1155 Motherboard Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16 GB (4 x 4 GB) DDR3-1600 CL9 Memory HDD's: 2x Western Digital Red 10 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive Case: Antec P101 Silent ATX Mid Tower Case PSU: SeaSonic FOCUS 550 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply HBA: LSI 9207-8 Boot drive: SanDisk Cruzer Fit 16GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive As you can probably tell, it's mostly parts from an old gaming rig. The purpose of this unraid server is to store photos from my photography. I'm currently using a Synology DS218j two bay NAS with two 6 TB HDD's but I could see that this wasn't a solution that would last me very long. With the Antec case I have 8x 3.5" HDD drive bays that I can add HDD's to as my storage needs increase. I started with the two 10TB drives to have one as a parity drive and one as a data drive. Obviously for right now all of my data is going to go onto the single data disk, but what about down the line when I add another disk? Should I just leave it as "high water" even though I'm likely to just add disks as I fill the ones in the array, or should I choose a different method?

Thanks. I knew the bandwidth is the compromise but I figure this box won't need to be super fast.

Preparing to basically do a DIY NAS with unraid, and I'm mainly using some older hardware from old gaming PC's. Using a i5 3570k on a ASRock H77 Pro4/MVP motherboard in a Antec P101 Silent case (this is new). This will primarily be used simply for storing photos, accessing those photos would be an infrequent thing. Don't plan to run any VM's or dockers or anything. I have a single 8GB stick of DDR3 1600, or a 4x4GB (16GB) kit. I'd like to use the single 8GB stick, does anybody see a problem with that?

Alright, you've convinced me. Option 3 it is 😄 Ultimately the only real drawback is the size and age of the components I'll be using, but I can get over the size issue and I don't really have reason to doubt my hardware. It's ran well for a long time. I do have a question about unRAID though, and Decto already touched on it slightly. Currently with my Synology I have it mapped to my Windows 10 workstation as a drive. This allows me to do a cloud backup of both the NAS and my workstation via Crashplan with a single computer subscription, and easy access to uploading/downloading files from it. If I build this NAS using unRAID will I be able to configure it in a similar fashion?

I'm currently using a Synology DS218j NAS for storing photos (wife & I have a small photography business) but I need to figure out a better long term solution as I'm approaching filling up the 6TB on it. We don't work with the photos on the NAS, it simply stores them. Occasionally we will access a couple for marketing purposes. I realize I could replace the 6TB drives with larger drives, but that kind of seems like a short term solution as my need to store these files isn't going to decrease anytime soon. So, looking at options I stumbled upon unRAID and the ability to just add another HDD when I need the space sounds really appealing. I realize I could do that with a larger Synology model as well, but the models with lots of bays seem quite expensive for what they are. So I have a couple of thoughts on what to do... 1. Just spend the money on a larger Synology. It keeps things simple but it appears to be the (much) more expensive route, and it would essentially be garbage in the future with any hardware failure. 2. I have a Intel NUC (model NUC7CJYH, Celeron J4005 CPU, 4GB of RAM, 250GB SSD) running Windows 10 that I currently use as small Plex media server, with an external 1TB drive for media. I like how small, quiet, and power efficient the NUC is. It hangs out right next to my Synology NAS on my entertainment center. I was thinking I could setup my NUC to run unRAID, buy a Mediasonic H82-SU3S2 8 Bay 3.5-inch Hard Drive Enclosure, connect it to the NUC, and pop a couple of new drives into it. I was thinking this would give me 8 bays for expanding my storage and if I were to need to expand even more I could buy a 2nd enclosure and add it in. This allows for more expandability in the future and if I understand things correctly it should allow me to move the disks to another "host" if my NUC were to stop working. I also like that it would be fairly compact, much smaller than a typical PC case and would mostly take up vertical space versus a 8+ bay Synology that would take up lots of horizontal space. The downside I see is that USB would probably make things a little slow, but since I access it rarely that doesn't seem like a huge issue. 3. I have some spare desktop PC parts from an old workstation I just replaced, so I could do a unRAID build with those. I have an old ASRock H77 Pro4/MVP ATX motherboard, i5-3570, and 8GB of RAM. I'd have to buy a new PSU for it, a HBA card (not enough SATA ports on the motherboard), and a new case (so it can hold more than a couple HDD's) but otherwise it was working fine when I replaced it. Since I already have the majority of this hardware there isn't really a price difference between this option or buying a HDD enclosure for the NUC. The only drawbacks I see here would be that the case would be much larger, it would draw more power, and most the hardware already has ~8 years of use on it. To be fair though, if the hardware were to fail then replacing the motherboard/cpu/ram could be accomplished fairly easily and inexpensively. 4. Buy the Mediasonic enclosure from option #2 and just use it as DAS plugged into my Windows 10 workstation. There really isn't a need for us to access the photos via the network, we would only be accessing it from our workstation anyways. The downside I see here is I would have to buy the hardware RAID version of the enclosure as I wouldn't be able to use unRAID for those disks, and I would have to have the enclosure take up desk space. It is kind of nice to have our NAS storage somewhere out of the way instead of having HDD's on the desk. The bonus with this route though is that I could buy the USB-C version of the enclosure since my workstation has USB-C ports available for it. You guys know unRAID (and probably data storage in general) better than I do, so I'm really hoping for some guidance on how to proceed. When we bought the little Synology we have now it was a huge step in the right direction, but our business has grown quite a bit since then and can see the need for more expandability going forward. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide, I really appreciate it.