Miss_Sissy

I agree: Unraid needs an rsync GUI, especially to enable and configure rsync as a service. rsync has been a basic part of every NAS OS I've ever run or considered, including QNAP, TrueNAS, XigmaNAS, OpenMediaVault, Synology, and Thecus. On those, it wasn't something where you had to 'roll your own' by manually enabling and configuring the rsync service from a command line or choose between multiple Docker rsync implementations. This should be a pretty easy feature to implement, so I hope that Limetech sees fit to make it a standard part of Unraid.

Thank you for your courteous replies. Two points: Redundant RAID is not just for uptime. It's also the data protection for all of the additions, deletions, and modifications to your data since your most recent backup, all of which you would lose if you had to go into disaster recovery mode and restore everything from the backup. The 3-2-1 strategy (mentioned by another user) is nearly 20 years old and slowly falling out of favor as more robust, modern strategies with names like 3-2-1-1-0 and 4-3-2 gain prominence. See this Backblaze white paper and this Stonefly article which go into more detail than would be appropriate in a thread response here. Forms of RAID that provide snapshot capabilities, such as ZFS RAID, give you a recovery option without resorting to a separate backup. With a RAID mode that can survive individual drive failures, the snapshot capability relegates backups to something only pulled out when something catastrophic has happened (fire, flood, ransomware, etc.) or when you need to recover old (rather than recent) versions of files. Unraid and Stonefly are on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Unraid being software aimed primarily at DIY home networking enthusiasts and Stonefly marketing their products as complete "Data Center Solutions." Stonefly has been around for a long time and is well-respected. You should talk to one of their reps and get a handle on the true costs, not only the cost of the RAID appliance(s) you would host locally. Find out the cost of all ongoing services you would need from them, including cloud and support. Determine what your firm's role would be in installing, configuring, and managing the Stonefly hardware and software. Then think about whether you have someone on staff who can handle it and has the hours needed. Not knowing more about your firm, your data, and your budget, that's about all I can suggest. This March 13, 2024 review/article about Stonefly's offerings might be a good place to start. I do not know the author or whether he has any conflicts of interest. Good luck.

I'm glad that the design worked and I'm sorry that the parts don't provide a unique GUID for our use with Unraid. I was nervous that you couldn't do any iterations to make adjustments, but it sounds like the service you used has printers that 'agree' with mine.

As we have been asked by a moderator to cease debating in this thread, I will abide by his direction.

You are incorrect. Without redundant RAID, a single drive failure can lead to the loss of all data added or changed since the last full, incremental, or differential backup. Nice strawman. I never suggested that only catastrophes cause data loss. When I referred to "catastrophic data loss," I was talking about to the magnitude of the loss, not the cause. But I think that you knew that. Deleting a file or a directory tree is not a catastrophic data loss on any competently run NAS and network. It's an inconvenience that needs to be resolved through the use of snapshots, revision control systems, and other tools regularly employed on modern networks. Had you read the entirety of my post, you would have seen that I addressed the importance of backups, including offsite storage. What I did not do was propose a one-size-fits-all backup strategy that I claimed was "the standard" (without citations) for critical data. I'd need a lot more information from the client before devising a backup strategy to fit their business needs.

I'm going to give you some general advice because it sounds like that's what you are asking for. If you're feeling overwhelmed, I recommend that you hire a consulting engineer near you who has done this sort of thing before. When dealing with business-critical data, you don't want to experiment and try to learn on your own. Protection against drive failures is something best accomplished through RAID, not backups. For example, on our primary NAS, up to two of the six discs can fail without the NAS going offline or losing any data. On our secondary NAS, which has less valuable data, one of the five drives can fail without data loss. There are various forms of RAID and they can be configured to survive multiple drive failures. To use an extreme example, you could buy four 18TB drives and configure RAID so that you would lose no data even if only one of the three remained functional. Backups are for dealing with a catastrophic data loss, whether through flood, fire, malware, hackers, or some other act of God, Satan, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. For that reason, you should follow some sort of backup strategy that puts backups offsite -- possibly in cloud storage or possibly on physical media. Based on what you've shared, my first thoughts would be an Unraid NAS that supports SAMBA protocol and automatic snapshots (snapshots let you roll back disks and directories to their state at some prior time). Unraid with a single ZFS pool consisting of four physical disks configured as RAID-Z2 would give you the abiliy to have half of the four discs fail simultaneously without any data loss, while supporting the aforementioned snapshots. My reason for suggesting Unraid is not because this is an Unraid forum. I'm on the Unraid forum because I've tried multiple commercial and open source NAS solutions and I think that Unraid is the best NAS OS, especially from a user interface perspective. I hope that I have left you with fewer questions rather than more. But remember that free advice is often worth what you pay for it, so don't trust me and especially don't trust anyone who disagrees with me!

I've been spooked off of getting 'creative.' The problem is that the first person who tries something will probably see success. But what happens if another person tries the same thing and it turns out that their device provides the same GUID numbers?

This is how we find things out. After the effort I put into designing the enclosure yesterday, I'll hang onto everything for general usage. Also, I don't want to get on Amazon's bad side for returning items that work as advertised.

Sorry about that. But it could be that it depends on revision or lot number of the adapter or the mounted mSATA SSD. You may be lucky even if I was not.

Warning: I bought both products from those links and got this GUID-used-or-blacklisted error when I tried to apply my activation code: So much for "appears to provide unique GUIDs for Unraid." I emailed Limetech support and am awaiting their response. I suggest that people hold off on buying these pending some sort of resolution.

After seeing your request to JonathanM, I created my own design which I am happy to share. It does not have any markings or trademarks, but it does have around 350 diamond-shaped ventilation holes for cooling. I've uploaded the .stl files to Thingiverse along with some images, notes, and settings. You can download the files and read more design here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6520361 I hope that folks find it useful.

It takes more than just a few, inconsequential moments for me to get down on the floor and reach in to blindly detach cables and extract the NAS from the bottom shelf of a tightly packed unit in order to remove the cover -- and then reverse the steps to return the NAS to service. There's a lot more chance for accidental damage in that operation than there is in just swapping an external flash drive. No one in my home is going to reach behind the NAS to remove, steal, or damage the USB flash drive plugged into the back of it. If some stranger has broken into my home, I have much bigger concerns than whether they will take the flash drive out of my Unraid server. If installing the flash drive inside of the cabinet adds twenty minutes of extra downtime every ten years, then downtime was not minimized. I don't need more stress and delays when I'm already dealing with a server that's gone offline. Nor do I want to be the only person who can swap it since I might be on travel when it fails, just as I was when a NAS drive failed and I had to talk a family member through swapping the drive (illustrating the value of drive trays/sleds and spare, pre-cleared drives ready for installation). What you're suggesting has its merits and it's something I considered when I put the NAS together. But it was not ideal for me.

That's a bad idea if you want to minimize downtime. I have removable drive trays because I don't want to pull my NAS out of service and disassemble it when something fails. It's a lot easier to reach behind and swap a thumb drive in the blind than it is to demate all of the cables, pull it out of the shelf, put it on a workbench, remove the cover, swap the thumb drive, replace the cover, put it back into the shelf, and then blindly try to plug the power and network cables into the correct locations.

No problem at all. I'm grateful whenever someone finds the time to assist me. I will have to do learn Unraid's routing UI. I'm guessing it can't be that different than pfSense and my EdgeRouter 4. With a dynamic IP address as the end-point, I'm going to have to think about how to handle the routing. It's a shame I can't just check a box that says "accept tunnel open requests on any NIC and reply out the same NIC through which the tunnel was opened."

Thanks for your reply. Feature request: With multiple NICs being common, users should be able to assign to which NIC WireGuard tunnels connect, even if they can only pick a single NIC for all WireGuard tunnels. I have two connections, a 940/880 Mbps (down/up) residential Internet connection and a 50/10 Mbps business Internet connection. The former has a dynamic IP and terms of service that prohibit running servers (think VPN) while the latter has multiple static IPs and permits servers of any kind. I don't want my Unraid box using up the very limited bandwidth of the business connection, or taking the massive performance hit. Therefore, I had set the metric on the residential gateway lowest. But I do want WireGuard on the business connection with a static IP address (via NAT port forwarding). While I would like to have a Wireguard tunnel available on the residential connection, it would be for emergency use only, such as when I am out of town and there's been some sort of network outage on the business side. That would be unlikely to be detected as a server with only sporadic, personal use.