dcruff

Thank you for your response. What I was missing was that I needed to shut down the array first. For me, that required that I do it in the morning because I have at least a dozen streams coming off of my media server (friends and family) every day, but mostly in the evening. I also had to choose the correct file system for the 3 drives (btrfs). XFS won't work if you want to combine them into one volume. Microsoft CoPilot was very helpful in this endeavor with step by step instructions and explanations. You have to be careful with AI because it will often lead you down the wrong path, which CoPilot did initially. Once I got on the correct path, the step by step guide from CoPilot was wonderful. I originally wanted to go with a RAID 0 on my DAS, but was convinced by another user on this forum, as well as CoPilot, that speed should not be my concern for a backup process. Rarely, will I be backing up the entire 33TB - generally doing differential backups. And with RAID 0, my files would be striped across three drives, and if one drive fails, the entire backup is useless. Now, the files are intact on separate drives even though they are configured as one. I have a single volume of 42TB that is running in an inexpensive DAS (Terramaster D4-320), running off USB 3.2 C connection. Everything is working wonderfully. It took almost 2 days to back up everything using luckyBackup, but I now have peace of mind. I'm going to now schedule regular updates to the backup. And I have very little downtime (minutes) when stopping the array. It was a good learning experience.

I've been trying to set up sharing on an Unassigned Disk Device and CoPilot says that there should be a share toggle next to the listing. I've mounted three new USB connected drives and I eventually want to combine them into one volume, but CoPilot says that I must first set them to 'Share'. I clicked on the gear icon and set it to Share, but I cannot see the drives remotely or in the SMB Shares.

Apparently the screen was stuck and needed to be refreshed. I haven't had that problem before.

I've been trying to figure out how to share Unassigned Disk Devices, and in trying various things including shutting down the array and mounting new drives, Then I got a message that the array could not be started due to too many devices and that I needed to upgrade. I upgraded to "Unlimited" and the array still would not start. So, I did a reboot and now the array says Starting, but it's been sitting there for 10 minutes and not really starting.

I'm not sure what you mean by that "I assumed your backup would be running Unraid" Can Unraid keep to arrays going or do I have to add these three new drives that are in the DAS to the existing array? CoPilot is telling me that I can manage the DAS drives outside the array and pool them with MergerFS or something similar for one large backup volume which would avoid mixing parity protected disks with non-parity protected disks. What do most people do to manage their backup volumes?

I guess you're right. I was thinking speed because I was comparing it to what I've been dealing with over the LAN. Now, I've got to figure out how to set it up as a new "ordinary" array. I set up my Unraid years ago and I've been pretty good at updating it and expanding it. Now, I'm I'll try to create a new volume. I've already erased the data on the drives that I put in the DAS because they were the drives that I had originally in my Unraid and I just upgraded those drives to larger ones. Now, those drives are just presenting themselves as 'Unassigned Devices' asking me to 'FORMAT' them. I'll be back here if I need more help. I probably could have tried a NAS instead of a DAS so that the array would be running on it's own.

I currently have 33TB of media (48TB total) on my Unraid server and it is working great. Backups have been tedious across the LAN to my Windows client using multiple USB drives. I have now set up a Terramaster D4-320 with 3 -14TB drives. AI suggested that I configure them as one drive using RAID 0 to get the optimal backup speed through striping. I'm not too concerned about a higher level of RAID because that's already set up in my primary Unraid storage. Now, I've learned that Unraid will not suuport a software RAID 0 on my Terramaster DAS. What is the best way to set up these drives as a single unit for backup purposes, prioritizing backup speed?

I keep getting this error and I don't know how to fix it. embyserver-diagnostics-20240615-1028.zip

The parity drive was cleared and formatted as part of the process of setting it up as a data drive. I only had 2 data disks before, so when I replaced the 14TB parity disk with a new 16 TB disk, I added that former parity drive (14TB) to the data array, making it a drive array of 1 Parity (16TB) and now 3 Data disks (14TB each).

That does appear to have fixed the issue, as my files appear to be intact (what few of them had actually been written to the drive). I'll watch it to see if this reoccurs. What scares me is that it happened within a day of getting the drive up and running as an array data drive instead of the parity drive. Thanks, the chkdsk function in the GUI was painless and it was necessary to know about removing the -n.

Yep, the drive was showing as mountable, and I mounted it, formatted it, and started using it. Loaded files, which got stored to it because my other two drives were getting full. Then the next day, they are unmountable and unusable. I didn't put much new data on it, be I'm very concerned that this could happen and makes me nervous in case it happened to one of my full drives. I went looking through the Alerts, Warnings, and Notices to see if there was any indication of a problem. None that I could see. I have seen that there are options to try to repair a faulty structure on a disk, but I would like to know what happened and how it can happen again. Realize that I have been using this particular disk in this UNRAID computer as the Parity Drive for over a year with absolutely no problems. But now that it's been cleared, re-mounted, formatted, and data stored on it, it is having problems. embyserver-diagnostics-20240409-0707.zip

After I successfully added the 14TB drive to the array (or so I thought), UNRAID showed me that I had a new 14TB of available, usable space. I then went about my business adding movie files, and other stuff to the array - a couple of hundred GB of data. I did this yesterday. Then today, the drive is inaccessible and I don't know why. My Emby Server still shows the movies that I added to the library, but now shows that all of the data is missing. What really concerns me is why there is no way of reclaiming that data when it is in a parity-protected drive array. What's the reason for the parity drive?

Well now I have another problem - the 14TB drive that I added to the array (Disk 3) is now showing 'Unmountable: Unsupported or No File System'. I don't have any errors that I can find, and files that I stored to that drive are now non-existent. I rebooted Unraid and nothing changes. The file system is listed as XFS. with 470 READS, 0 WRITES, and 0 ERRORS. The movie files that I added are now where to be found, assumable being stored on Disk 3. Shouldn't there be some kind of recovery available since I have a parity drive associated with my array?

I finally figured it out, with the help of ChatGPT, It was a lengthy process to get everything working the way I wanted. The New 16TB drive took about 22 hours to set itself up as the new parity drive once I cleared it. I had to take the array down, then in the drive screen, I picked the top option to assign the new drive as 'Parity 1'. It was not intuitive because the option didn't show up until I selected that drive space and a drop down showed my unassigned drive, which I selected. After the parity drive was set up, I added my 14TB disk (previous parity disk) and added it to the array. It took another 18 hours to clear and prepare the disk. After that, I had to format the drive and then it was ready. Now everything works.

Actually, I may have figured it out. I put the new unformatted 16TB disk back in, started up unraid and then stopped the array. From there, I was able to see an option to assign the drive to the array. I believe that it is now rebuilding the parity device (new 16TB disk). I'll update when it is completed.