BitForce

Greetings everyone thank you for creating a nice community around Unraid. I have evaluated 4 other platforms commercial and open source before coming to Unraid. Overall I wanted to leave some feedback on the unraid platform and ask some clarifying questions on upcoming features. Regarding feedback there are two major key factors maturity of nas functionality and how integrated the community app ecosystem. Let me take a moment to explain. Nas Functionality: While there are a number of paper cut issues I won't go into unless asked there was one glaring issue that needs to be addressed by Unraid developers. Backups! A nas should be properly backed up locally and in the cloud or off site location alternative. This feature should be a core part of Unraid providing backup/replication. Right now this is a community led feature but it should be a deeply integrated part of Unraid. I'm not saying community can't provide alternatives but this should not be a community only feature. Other Platforms make it simple and lowers the bar by providing best practice for data management. App Ecosystem: Consider the pathways involved with hosting services internally (LAN) or externally (WAN) for set up by the end user E.G. DNS records, reverse proxy, docker app data management and so on. Again there is community apps for these but no attempt to provide a unified built in to further support unraid's community docker platform. The user should be able to provide a domain/sub domains define if it's to be exposed if the service internally or externally, through a ports, VPN, cloudflare argo. Outside of a few details of Port forwarding and possibly DNS records this really could be automated for the user. Managing Docker App Data is very important as services corrupt their data or something else can go wrong. Going back to the backup issue App Data need to be easy to backup snapshot per service instead of the entire App Data. The above functionality would serve the majority of use cases. At a high level there's a lot of advantages to having a community driven product but it does have some drawbacks. Fragmentation of user experience and therefore core product features. It doesn't have to be this way and that's by providing comprehensive features by default with Unraid. Those defaults could be switched out for community alternatives. This allows the community to experiment and develop alternative approaches answering the community's needs which creates a feedback loop to inform the core Unraid platform. Questions before purchase: On the horizon is Official ZFS support. Yes I know there's a community plug in for ZFS and I've used it. I look forward to this not only for the performance reasons but at the file system level it supports snapshots/replication. Will these features be integrated and exposed in the unraid GUI as a core feature? If I invest setting up now in unraid will there be a migration pathway to ZFS from existing unraid array? Ultimately my question do the developers want to develop a full featured nas backup solution and a streamlined pathway for self hosting? These features could leverage existing open source projects. I wouldn't expect these features to be there in a year or even two years time. It takes time to roll these things out incrementally and then grow the maturity. Do you want to grow developing those features? I'm leery at this point Investing in the Unraid product that doesn't have a backup mechanism or the potential desire for the developers implement backups as a core part of its feature set. Parity is not enough as a core feature. Overall I'm willing to invest in the platform if there's expression of interest from the developers to work on these issues as time allows.

Starting unscheduled incremental image backup of volume "D:"... Basing image backup on last full image backup Error retrieving last image backup. Doing full image backup instead. Data on volume is too large for VHD files with 1.99972 TB. VHD files have a maximum size of 2040GB. Please use another image file format. Transferred 4.19727 KB - Average speed: 3.664 KBit/s Time taken for backing up client Main-Desktop: 9s Backup failed Having large files on a partition keeps it from being backed up in an image with urbackup . The above urbackup client log suggests that the file system needs to be a different type then VHD. Based on a little research it also could be related to system being backed up to. My Unraid array is formatted as btrfs filesystem. See the following: https://forums.urbackup.org/t/data-on-volume-is-too-large-for-vhd-files/7137 https://forums.urbackup.org/t/noob-question-backups-of-3tb-and-bigger/10164/5 https://www.urbackup.org/features.html - See limitations Edit: urbackup supports support cow format: btrfs XFS (with cow enabled) ReFS winbtrfs (will be in the next 2.5.x release) However. Interesting with UNRAID urbackup server doesn not show **cow** despite being formatted to btrfs.