JonathanM

I believe you answered your own question. Once they have access to the Unraid GUI, they have complete control. You must secure any access with a VPN tunnel or something similar, i.e. teamviewer or other secure remote access through another machine on the LAN

type mc, it allows file management. Be aware, you are all powerful and can easily trash your windows if you're not careful.

All of them over their full capacity?

As always, the typical disclaimer that RAID or Unraid is NOT backup, it's only redundancy, applies. As long as your backup strategy is working ok for you, then you should be fine to go ahead with a double rebuild.

When you have unraid booted you should be able to mount the NTFS drives using the Unassigned Devices plugin and access the files directly. Then if you wish you can copy the files you want to the Unraid drive using mc at the command line. What you are attempting to do is not a normal setup by any means, and for several reasons you would be better off assigning some random USB stick (not the Unraid boot drive) as disk1 for Unraid, and using the 480GB as a cache disk. The label "cache" is misleading, it's more of a fast access general apps drive, which fits your layout much better. All the tutorials and examples assume you are accessing Unraid from a different machine, so in order to do it all from one tower you are going to have to adapt and overcome.

If everything is healthy and parity is in sync it should work fine. The major thing that could go wrong is if one of the drives you are NOT replacing happened to fail during the rebuild. When was your last parity check with zero errors?

The two script workaround may not be needed any more, I haven't bothered to investigate. A lot of things have changed in Unraid since that writeup.

Most likely explanation is a 2GB partition with the rest of the drive unallocated.

I think you have ISO (windows installation media) and vdisk image (file that acts like a hard drive for the vm) confused.

Just to clarify a little, generate checksums on the original files, then generate on the copy. If they match you are good. Doesn't particularly matter what program you use to generate or verify the checksums, as long as it's the same algorithm. Keeping a copy of checksums for your files is good insurance anyway, as it allows you to monitor for corruption in general.

Yes, I have another server at a different address, it's not only for backup, but yes, the servers complement each other with the most important data. I don't bother keeping everything backed up, just the irreplaceable data. Renting space on somebody elses computer (cloud backup) makes sense if you only have a small amount to back up, once you get beyond several TB it gets messy or expensive. I prefer to keep my data myself. Connection speed is also a primary concern for some.

Do you still have that original USB stick? Do you have the license key file?

Key in the config folder is linked to the flash ID embedded in hardware, so as long as you use the same physical USB stick, the license key will work. Doesn't matter if you reformat.

I see your 3 and raise you my 21. I manage a whole raft of sites, I'm not about to upgrade without good reason.

Cache pools can be single devices, which don't have redundancy, and it's possible to set up BTRFS RAID volumes unassigned. Drive redundancy isn't a factor, but the ability to manage multiple pools in the share system certainly is an advantage.

However you decide, keep in mind that Unraid or any RAID flavor is NOT a backup, it's purely high availability when a drive fails. It can't protect against file deletion or corruption, either accidental or malicious, or any number of other risks to the integrity of your data. You MUST keep current backups of files you don't want to lose.

https://www.elby.ch/en/products/vcd.html

It doesn't care. You can mix format types in the array all you want. You could have 1 BTRFS, 1 BTRFS- encrypted, 1 XFS, and 1 XFS encrypted if you want to. Once the drive is unlocked, the encryption is transparent to the client. I would advise that backups should be the highest priority for data on encrypted volumes, as recovery tools really don't work on encrypted volumes. It's not that the chances for corruption are higher, just that the consequences are more severe.

You can safely delete them. They were created to support VM's and docker containers.

Figure out what process is hanging up the normal stop sequence and fix it. Also, you should never get even close to running out of battery, it should be configured to be fully shut down well before the battery reaches 50%.

Either UD+ isn't installed, or destructive mode hasn't been enabled in UD settings.

Ready made SAS enclosures are typically pricey, but you can set up your own using readily available hardware for much less money, start looking here.

So it's working properly after the upgrade with that change?