acurcione

I suspect that there are many users who have installed Cache_Dirs, but don't actually need it. If access to your files is solely through the User Share system, and you don't fall under the NFS exception mentioned by WeeboTech (learned something new today!), then you don't need Cache_Dirs. The User Share system acts as a Cache of Dirs, because it is the merger of the individual disk directories, kept in memory. And if you do access your files at times directly from the disks, but don't have any programs that poll those disk directories and you only rarely 'explore' them (with a file manager, such as Windows Explorer), then you don't strictly need Cache_Dirs either. Cache_Dirs may add some convenience though, because if you do feel like browsing through the directories of any disk, Cache_Dirs will have them in memory and the drive won't have to spin up. I recommend reading the original document on Cache_Dirs, Keep directory entries cached. It's a little dated, but still helpful. If you need to access a file, for example to play it, then you are asking for the content of the file, and that isn't cached. So the disk it is on will have to spin up, causing the delay on first access you see. Thanks Rob. Yeah, I pretty much think I don't need it based on that article. The only time I access the disks directly are when I'm being anal and double checking things. And I probably shouldn't even be doing that. Having said that, I'm a little disheartened that documentation isn't better OR at the very least setup for a newbie to get a system setup with more ease. I thought I had found that, but it seems even that walk through is outdated. It's unrelated to this though, since this isn't something covered there. After reading about it, it sounded like something everyone should have installed. Anyway, I appreciate the information and I will be uninstalling this since it seems completely unnecessary for how I'm using it. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

For now it's dedicated 100% to unRAID. I changed the settings anyway and things are actually OK memory wise. Also, I wasn't actually having any issues when I posted. I was just replying to the OP. But I learned something in the process so it isn't all bad. Something was going on though that I can't explain. I had rebooted this afternoon so all the drives were spun up, but when I just hopped on the server they were all still spun up, including the parity drive, but nothing was accessing the box at that point. Also checked the logs and it showed the spin down event several hours ago, but no spin up event even after I accessed the cache drive to spin it up - even though it's. SSD so in theory it should never spin down even if it shows it. I dunno what that's all about, but I haven't had any issues with drives spinning down. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

16GB, 806 movies, 1104 tv shows And yes, my memory is pretty well maxed out, but I figured that was normal. I'm guessing not? Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

This was an option left in by Joe to satisfy users who still felt it accomplished something for them, but it is difficult to see the rationale for that. User shares are a file system maintained entirely in memory, so caching them is just making an extra copy of the file system elements in the same RAM. That seems like a waste of RAM, with no benefit. The idea behind Cache_dirs is to keep in memory those file system elements that are constantly being requested from disk, so that the disk does not have to keep spinning up. I would set this to NO and free up some memory. Well I guess I completely misunderstood the purpose of this. The only thing anyone should be accessing are user shares. If the entire user share(s) in memory, then why does it take so long to pull up when it's accessed (at least the first time)? Isn't that the point of this plugin? I mean if your right then I totally did this wrong and should remove the "Media" inclusion AND change that setting to no. But again, this is still confusing based on your comment. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Not sure I'm the best to answer, but since I only recently installed this I'll give it a shot. I'm pretty much using the default settings, although I'm expressly only including one user share where all my media is. Here are my settings: Folder caching function: enabled Wait until array is online: yes Force disks busy: no Suspend during Mover process: yes Scan user shares: yes Minimum interval between folder scans (sec): blank Maximum interval between folder scans (sec): blank Maximum scan level depth: 4 Excluded folders (separated by comma): blank Included folders (separated by comma): Media User defined options: blank Hope this helps. My array is behaving normally and isn't spinning up when it shouldn't.

Thanks. When I setup this box I was using the configuration tutorial which has me use unMenu and I didn't realize the different plugin type until later on. As soon as I'm able to I'm going to do as you suggest and use plugins for anything that is available. That will be my first choice from now on! Thanks again for straitening me out on this.

Thanks. I appreciate the help. I looked at the logs and it shows (I think) the proper powerdown being installed. So whatever I did must have had no affect whatsoever. I'm attaching the log so you or others can verify what is getting loaded up, but it all looks correct. Although I also installed infozip via unMenu since I was getting console errors about it and the logs not getting archived, but I don't see anything in the log about that either. So I have no idea if it's actually there or not. The apcupsd isn't loading as a plugin that I can see, but it shows it's starting up. I didn't even realize there was a plugin other than what was in unMenu so if I need to modify my installation at all, please let me know. Otherwise if everything is OK, then I won't mess with it. Thanks again. syslog.txt

The latest apcupsd plugin already has the latest powerdown script active. No need to install it twice. Crap! Well, it sure didn't make that clear in unmenu. So I can safely uninstall 1.0.2 from unmenu then? And actually, is there a way to uninstall it via command line so I don't have to reboot? Cause it looks like unmenu can only disable reinstall at boot. I can't reboot at the moment. Which plugin did you install? You keep talking about unmenu so now I'm confused. did you install this plugin, Apcupsd-3.14.10-i486-4_rlw-dl.plg? From what thread did you download the apcupsd plugin from? Yeah, I'm confused as well. After I built my box I installed unMenu so I could manage packages/install them. This is what I thought I was supposed to do. I added the latest apcupsd (3.14.10), mail and the clean powerdown package since all that was needed for apcupsd (or at least that's what it said). If apcupsd was already setup to use the newer version of powerdown then my addition of it might not have done anything, but I have no idea. I didn't realize that unMenu was so outdated with things. After a bit I also installed Dynamix, but that shouldn't have anything to do with this. Should I even be using unMenu at this point? Maybe switch over to control panel or just do command line? I just need to know what I need to do to have the proper one installed at boot, if it isn't setup to do this already.

The latest apcupsd plugin already has the latest powerdown script active. No need to install it twice. Crap! Well, it sure didn't make that clear in unmenu. So I can safely uninstall 1.0.2 from unmenu then? And actually, is there a way to uninstall it via command line so I don't have to reboot? Cause it looks like unmenu can only disable reinstall at boot. I can't reboot at the moment.

I installed the apcupsd plugin and then installed the powerdown script that is in unmenu which is 1.0.2. I'd like to get onto this new version but am totally confused as to how to do that. In looking in /boot/packages I actually see the new version sitting there, but I didn't do that so I guess it's automatic. How do I get the new version active and working with apcupsd and the old one uninstalled? I'm guessing I can uninstall the old version via unmenu? Thanks.

I didn't think it supported FW and my MB certainly doesn't. If I were to direct connect it to unRAID I'd have to buy an eSATA card and connect it up that way. That may or not be worth the trouble and cost though. Would certainly be faster than USB 2 though.

I'm all for simpler! My main purpose with unRAID was to allow for backup of movie and tv files, provide another area for backup of photos and other important files, and act as a TM server for my wife's Air. I've already got an online storage for some data, but I'm likely not going to put movie files there. Now it's just a question of whether to keep my 4 bay enclosure direct connected to the Mini and backup on the network or to direct connect it to unRAID, use unRAID as primary NAS, and back up movie files to the other array. This is all a matter of preference I guess. At some point I'll outgrow my little array and will build another server, but that shouldn't be for a while. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That array is a 4 drive RAID enclosure, direct connected via FW800. I've read though quite a bit of that post and threads before posting my question. I know I want to backup, just not sure which setup I described would be best. Not even sure one method is better than the the other! Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I built an unRAID server to act as a backup for my media array connected to my Mac Mini and used it to hold all my movies/tv files while I rebuilt that array to be larger (another reason for going to unRAID!). That process was OK, although I have had issues with all the damn hidden apple files since I decided to do the sync over AFP. I'm only using SMB now and made an effort to clean that crap out. OK... So I have all my data on unRAID, rebuilt the other array to be larger, and started the transfer back to the Mini again. And this is where I'm at now - and thinking maybe I shouldn't do this. Why? After I had all my data on unRAID I changed my Plex server settings on my Mini to point to unRAID and everything seemed to work just fine. Over Wi-Fi no less (with a 450Mb link I might add). Anyway, the purpose for building an unRAID server was so I had a backup of my data and had the possibility of further uses down the road. My question at this point is does it make sense to keep my current array direct connected to my Mini and just backup to the unRAID over the network OR should I connect the array directly to unRAID and do an rsync (or whatever) from there? The first option costs me nothing and I should be able to get a decent automated sync going. The section option would require a purchase of a PCIe card with eSATA and preferably some internal SATA III ports as well (for future) - OR I could connect it with USB 2.0 and it costs nothing, but would likely be slow as hell. I throw this question up to the group since you all have the experience with this. This is my first foray into NAS so I don't have anything to compare it to with figuring out the best way to do this. Please let me know your thoughts on this. I can certainly stop the sync I have going since it's going to take days to finish anyway!

Same issue on a fairly new unRAID setup. Not knowing what might be causing it, I unplugged all the drive cables/replugged all the drive cables, moved the usb flash card from the cable inside the case to an outside port, spun up/down all drives individually... Still get the error at random times. Guess I'm not going to worry about it!

Wow. I looked at that thread several times and I totally missed that. You description certainly sounds correct and that's how I'm running it so it should be fine. I am still noticing a long delay the first time accessing he shares though so I wasn't sure it was actually cached yet. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I set this up on my new system and have a question on one option: wait for array to come online before start of cache scan of directories I've searched for a better explanation of it, but couldn't really find one. Does setting this to "no" mean that it will scan the drives all the time and not allow them to spin down? And "yes" means it doesn't do a new scan of the directories in cache until the array comes online at some point? Thanks in advance.

Just a quick note about this so you don't keep chasing your tail in the future. When unraid boots, it unpacks the entire file system into RAM, and runs from there. The only locations that are "real" are located in /boot and /mnt/disk(X), everything else is gone and created anew when you boot. So... if you make changes to /etc config files and want the changes to be persistent, you will need to write a little script to make those same changes at boot time, and store it in /boot and call it from the go file. Thanks Jonathan. The funny thing is, I knew this was the case, but when I was hunting for instructions setting up rsync as a daemon they didn't mention that. Once I saw the changes were gone I knew what happened. I've since found instructions on setting this up so it can be put in at boot time, but haven't actually tried it yet.

Thanks again. I'm not on Mavericks just yet. I was waiting till that got a few more point releases before I update my systems. And yeah, I pretty much ignore all the hidden files. Being as my first time using unRAID I wanted to see what it was doing and won't be poking around at the disk level too much. I still can't explain completely what I was seeing except to say it wasn't so much moving the files as it was adding them again and then deleting the other one. This makes it appear as though it was moving the file, but in reality it wasn't. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Something just dawned on me... Could it be that once I accessed a folder via AFP and thus OS X generates it's hidden files that this is what's causing rsync to think things with the folder itself have changed and thus just starts copying the entire thing again? Just a thought...

Thanks for the reply Dale. I might have this figured out, but before I celebrate how about I make sure I actually set up the share(s) properly. Cause if I didn't then I have to start this 3 day long copy process again. At first I thought I'd setup 2 shares, movies and tv, and then sync those 2 folders from my Mini and it's array. But than I thought about it and figured why not just create one share for "Media", split level blank, nothing included/excluded, and then just copy in the movies and tv directories from my Mini and let unRAID handle all everything from there. This seemed to work well except the odd issue we discussed in the other thread, but I'm pretty sure I know what happened there. So that's the setup. Pretty crackin simple. 1. I was copying to the Media share and NOT the individual disk(s). 2. Explained above. 3. CCC settings were pretty vanila. No filters or exclusions. Initially trying with "Delete anything that doesn't exist on the source". As for the weird movement of files you mentioned, I'm pretty sure that happened since disk 1 was already at the half full mark and disk 2 was not. So whatever unRAID was adding again, it was doing it to disk 2. Which just looked damned odd, but probably completely normal. So, just now I did a little test. I wanted to do this from rsync, but all the changes I made to the inetd.conf (to run rsync as a daemon) and the created rsyncd.conf file I created in /etc/ on unRAID were all gone after a reboot. I don't know how to keep that from happening right now so I just dug into CCC a bit more. Being just a frontend to rsync I figured I just needed play with more settings and tried the checksum setting. Bad idea since these files are HUGE it takes forever to check just one file. So then I just set it so it "don't modify files newer on destination" and THAT seemed to do the trick. Nothing got copied again. Of course this would also mean that if for some reason I did something on unRAID first it would be ignored, but that's OK at this point. So, that issue is solved, thank goodness, but the mystery of why rsync kept thinking files and/or folders were modified when they weren't is beyond me. A little googling and i see this is actually a common issue in some cases with no clear cut reason as to why though. unRAID might be modifying the folder timestamp or something like that. I dunno. In all the time I've used CCC or rsync for that matter, I've never seen this happen. But those times were always between 2 Macs or from a Mac to an external drive or between 2 drives on one Mac. I've never tried to do this to a target that was a different OS and/or file system. Heck, for all I know it could have something to do with using AFP shares. If you can shed any more light on this that would be great, but it appears as though I have it working mostly. Still love to know exactly why it was happening though or how best to do this in the future.

I had posted this in another thread, but the original issue was resolved so I wanted to give this it's own home. I used Carbon Copy Cloner on my Mini to copy my media over to unRAID prior to assigning parity and actually using the drive. CCC is pretty just a pretty frontend that uses rsync on the backend. I've never had any issues with it in the past so I didn't think it would cause me issues now. I setup one single user share, Media, and synced my movies and tv directories into it so it looks like this: Media >movies >>movie directory >>>movie file(s) >tv >>tv directory >>>Season(s) >>>>>tv file(s) After my initial clone completed I wanted to run it again to pick up any new files that were put in prior to starting the sync. These should have ONLY been TV shows. Right when I started the sync and it started comparing files, it picked up on a Movie that was already there (on disk 1) and proceeded to start putting it in again (on disk 2). I stopped the sync and started to do some manual compares of things. After this I shut down CCC and started it again and then tried the process on a single folder that I knew had a new episode on it. That worked perfectly and unRAID created a new folder on disc 2 and placed the episode in there. Great. So I decided to run it on the entire TV directory which should have added about 6 or 7 new shows. Well... unRAID instead is moving files around from one drive to the other and I have no idea why. Example: Criminal Minds Season 2 - all episodes existed on disk 1. There should have been no need to add any files. Now there is one episode that got placed on disk 2 and the one on disk 1 removed. This is completely baffling behavior considering CCC is just a frontend for rsync and I know others are using that here. What in the world is going on here? Syncing up should only be adding/removing changed files, but that is absolutely not what's happening. Maybe it's a timestamp thing? Size thing? Permissions thing since I'm sending from the Mini to UnRAID and not the other way around? I have no freaking clue. After that sync finished copying files it shouldn't have, I set about using rsync from the command line and the same damn thing is happening. As soon as I run a command it's trying to copy files that are already there. I'm at a loss here guys. None of this is making any sense. I'm randomly checking timestamps and everything looks identical. So why can I perform a simple sync from my Mac to unRAID without sending the same files over and over? I don't get it... It's a good thing I haven't setup the parity drive. All the back and forth I'm doing would be brutal. I am wanting to get this array 100% up so I can enlarge my current drive array (which means destroying all the data) and use this as the main in the interim. All this behavior is making me very nervous. How the heck can I tell if everything is synced up 100% if every time I sync it's adding files it shouldn't? HELP?!

I'm marking this as solved and moving the new problem to a new thread since I don't think it's related.

Ok... so after that sync finished copying files it shouldn't have, I set about using rsync from the command line and the same damn thing is happening. As soon as I run a command it's trying to copy files that are already there. I'm at a loss here guys. None of this is making any sense. I'm randomly checking timestamps and everything looks identical. So why can I perform a simple sync from my Mac to unRAID without sending the same files over and over? I don't get it... It's a good thing I haven't setup the parity drive. All the back and forth I'm doing would be brutal.

Yep. You can clean them up if they annoy you...but wait 'til you're done with the bulk copying, because they may just come back again! Don't hesitate to ask for info or help if things don't seem to work right. Ok... I obviously have NO idea what is supposed to happen behind the scenes cause now I'm seeing even stranger things happen. Before I get to that, for my initial question/problem, after everything finished copying I went into drive 1 and removed the blank folders. I know I didn't need to, but didn't see a point of them being there. Now for the new issue. After my initial clone completed I wanted to run it again to pick up any new files that were put in prior to starting the sync. These should have ONLY been TV shows. Right when I started the sync and it started comparing files, it picked up on a Movie that was already there (on disk 1) and proceeded to start putting it in again (on disk 2). I stopped the sync and started to do some manual compares of things. After this I shut down CCC and started it again and then tried the process on a single folder that I knew had a new episode on it. That worked perfectly and unRAID created a new folder on disc 2 and placed the episode in there. Great. So I decided to run it on the entire TV directory which should have added about 6 or 7 new shows. Well... unRAID instead is moving files around from one drive to the other and I have no idea why. Example: Criminal Minds Season 2 - all episodes existed on disk 1. There should have been no need to add any files. Now there is one episode that got placed on disk 2 and the one on disk 1 removed. This is completely baffling behavior considering CCC is just a frontend for rsync and I know others are using that here. What in the world is going on here? Syncing up should only be adding/removing changed files, but that is absolutely not what's happening. Maybe it's a timestamp thing? Size thing? I have no freaking clue. I am wanting to get this array 100% up so I can enlarge my current drive array (which means destroying all the data) and use this as the main in the interim. All this behavior is making me very nervous. How the heck can I tell if everything is synced up 100% if every time I sync it's adding files it shouldn't? HELP?!