tayshserve

Sorry for the delay in response, work week started off busy! So the diags I posted were from before I connected a new SSD, so just the original one should be in the logs.

More lessons learned from past failures – when I bought my replacement SSD I actually bought 2 to have 1 as a back up. I popped that into my server and was able to remove the corrupt drive, format the new backup drive I had, and add that as the cache. I now have the corrupt drive as an unassigned device, however I'm still unable to format it. I suppose it could be the cable the original drive is using? I'm back up and running but would still like to understand what happened here so I can prevent it in the future. Thanks again, really appreciate your help as our whole house runs on this server haha.

Hope I'm not posting an issue that's already been brought up, tried to search/skim the thread. I put the following into the "Excluded Folders" field in the backup setup. /mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache/, /mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Media/, /mnt/user/appdata/plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/, /mnt/user/appdata/sonarr/MediaCover/ I thought this would ignore just those child folders. However in actuality what happened is the entire parent folder was ignored. So I got no backup of Plex or Sonarr in my backup folder. Did I configure this improperly? Seems like others have no issues with this setup. Pre post updated – lol haven't even hit submit yet but I'm going to post this question in case I'm wrong here.. I'm assuming these paths are supposed to be relative to the appdata folder? So I can drop /mnt/user/appdata/? Seems weird that would cause the entire folder to be ignored though. Anyway, thanks in advance for any help! I just had to restore and realized I didn't have a Plex backup, but I did have many other critical folders backed up safely and Plex can rebuild itself. Love the plugin!

I'm not sure what's going on.. I've tried a few different things. Tried to unassign the device, start the array back up, stop the array, reassign the device.. no luck. I also tried deleting the pool and starting from scratch, nothing. Seems like something is going on with this disk? Diags attached, thanks! tayshserve-diagnostics-20230220-1641.zip

@trurl hmm more interesting developments – now it appears I'm unable to format the cache drive. It just gets stuck in the "Formatting" state. I feel this typically takes 5 seconds or so and the UI updates that the process is done.

Yeah – so this is probably good advice so I don't waste my time.. Especially since the Plex database can be rebuilt. It's just annoying telling all my family they need to repin all of their content. I'm just gonna format and get myself back on track, plex should be easy enough to get going again. I want to say, thanks for sticking with this thread @trurland shout out to @JorgeBwho has also helped me directly before and countless times before by just being the solution to other issues on the boards.

Going to install that now.. I currently have all the folder I would suspect on the array – just seems weird the last modified dates are super old for everything. Screenshot attached of the folders. So yeah currently my appdata folder is set to "Only : Cache" which I'm guessing is incorrect, and means that my appdata folder never gets copied back to the array. So the only way to remedy my Plex situation (all others are backed up) would be to potentially get the files off the cache before formatting? Is that even possible?

Funny story – this is the 3rd time I've had some type of cache drive related issue. The first time I had no backup – learned my lesson and backed up my entire appdata directory to Backblaze b2 via Duplicati. The second time, I restored from the Backblaze backup.. and it took FOREVER. Like 20 hours or so. Anyway, I decided to use CA Backup and noticed I could ignore a folder.. so I ignored all the heavy media folders within Plex. Turns out you can't ignore just a child folder? Or – if you can, I didn't do it properly. Anyway, I now specifically have no backup for plex! So hopefully whatever is on the array for Plex isn't corrupt!

Here's the diagnostics one more time! Is there any way to get files off of this drive before I format it (assuming I'm gonna have to go that route)? Wondering if I can attempt to save a couple of databases – I feel like whenever this happens I have to reconfigure Plex and Home Assistant as their database seems to corrupt and start from scratch. tayshserve-diagnostics-20230220-1315.zip

Still comes out as unmountable – I'll attach the logs from the check again. Looking like I'll just have to format the drive and deal with any potential fallout? (almost always plex DB corruption lol) check_logs_new.txt

Honestly no real reason. Before my cache drive decided to die I had like 300+ days of uptime – things were pretty stable so I just didn't want to mess with it. Before I got about formatting this cache drive and all of that – should I try updating and run the check again and see what happens?

I ran it straight from the GUI – first I ran it with `-nv` then I ran it with just `-v` after that.

I was being dramatic and quite frankly, lazy. I attached the full output from the check in a txt file, it's only 300kb. Thanks for the nudge @trurl check_logs.txt

Appreciate the reply – just stopped the array (was in maintenance mode), started it, and pulled the diagnostics. See attached. tayshserve-diagnostics-20230220-1133.zip

Hello all! So I recently had a cache drive failure, and replaced it (maybe 3 weeks ago, tops) with a brand new SSD. I woke up this morning and noticed my Docker containers were down, so I went to investigate. I tried restarting the container in question, and noticed some errors while it was trying to start. I rebooted the server, and once it came up I saw that the cache drive was "unmountable". Since I'm on unraid 6.x, I stopped the array, started in maintenance mode, and ran a check (-nv), followed by another check (-v). It's weird it seems like the process was successful as no errors were reported (some files seem to have been moved to lost+found), but I'm still not able to mount the drive. Here's the tail end of the log from the check I ran. Phase 7 - verify and correct link counts... resetting inode 816629359 nlinks from 1 to 2 resetting inode 2032652 nlinks from 2 to 3 resetting inode 3164097 nlinks from 2 to 1 Maximum metadata LSN (48:72667) is ahead of log (47:440994). Format log to cycle 51. XFS_REPAIR Summary Mon Feb 20 11:02:02 2023 Phase Start End Duration Phase 1: 02/20 11:01:59 02/20 11:01:59 Phase 2: 02/20 11:01:59 02/20 11:01:59 Phase 3: 02/20 11:01:59 02/20 11:02:00 1 second Phase 4: 02/20 11:02:00 02/20 11:02:00 Phase 5: 02/20 11:02:00 02/20 11:02:00 Phase 6: 02/20 11:02:00 02/20 11:02:01 1 second Phase 7: 02/20 11:02:01 02/20 11:02:01 The full logs are really long and I'm not sure how useful they are for anyone offering help, so let me know if I should include those. There really isn't a next steps option on the page besides a full redo, is that what's required here? https://wiki.unraid.net/Check_Disk_Filesystems#Redoing_a_drive_formatted_with_XFS Kind of a bummer since I just went through this process of restoring my app data, but I just want to make sure I don't have any more options before I move forward. Thanks!!

@JorgeB thanks for the reply! New disk should be here sometime this afternoon so I'll do all of this and let you know what happens. I'm guessing this is the solution though so I'll mark it as such.

Hey all – so I was out of town for about a week or so and half way through the trip all of my Docker containers slowly became unresponsive.. Sonarr, Radarr, Plex all seemed to first lose access to data (plex wouldn't actually play any media) then each was unreachable as I'm guessing the Docker service itself went down. I just got home today and noticed that I have some failures called out on the Cache drive. My `appdata` folder is missing from shares, as well as my `_MEDIA` folder that contains... well everything. I can attach some logs and the smart test from the cache drive. I'm kind of scared to reboot or anything as last time I ran into issues I went with a reboot and lost all logs, lost some data, etc. I already ordered a new SSD cache drive as I suspect that my current one is failing based on a couple searches, but I wanted to confirm that and then ask for some advice. So my `appdata` folder is backed up on backblaze b2 via duplicati. Once I get Docker service running again I'm assuming it'll be easy enough for me to restore that folder in it's original glory. What concerns me is the missing shares. I know the data is still there, as my dashboard is reporting that my 12TB worth of drives is 60 something percent full. Should I be worried about data loss? Thanks in advance for any help, trying to do the right thing this time and reach out for advice before blowing everything up and digging myself a deeper hole. More basic info – I'm running a single cache drive, 3 disks in the array (all 4TB) with a matching 4TB parity drive. Screenshot of the cache drive smart test results (also included the results attached to the post): tayshserve-diagnostics-20230201-1629.ziptayshserve-smart-20230201-1630.zip

So I attempted to delete a file I thought was corrupted (Plex database) however when I spun things back up I was still getting errors. After realizing that data loss on the cache drive wasn't such a huge deal I just formatted it and moved on. Any idea what got me into this mess? I was just trying to spin up a VM – now I'm scared to.

Just posting updates here hoping someone smarter than I will chime in! Ok so the check finished and found zero errors. I stopped the array, removed the partiy drive, started teh array, then added the parity back and started. The parity is rebuilding, however now I'm concerned that my cache drive is the culprit. Obviously I'll let the parity sync/rebuild finish, but when it does any ideas for how to handle my cache drive?

So I think my main issue now (read check is almost done) is that the parity drive is listed as disabled.. how would I go about re-enabling that to attempt to remedy this situation?

So I attempted to create a new VM today using an ISO from Pop OS. I curled the iso into the correct location, used the Ubuntu template, and clicked create. This process hung and took quite some time – I'm guessing some setting I used caused these problems. The page eventually crashed while creating the VM forcing me to refresh. I saw the CPU basically pinned at 100%, the flash drive showing as unavailable in the header, and errors piling up on my parity drive. After a bit the whole server completely locked up, and I was forced to reboot. When things came back up (to my surprise) I was able to see that the array had started and the disks listed no new errors. However when I started my Plex docker, I realized the filesystem was still unavailable as no media would play. Upon further inspection, I noticed my parity drive listed as disabled, and fix common problems calling out that my cache drive was set to read only. I started a read check on all the disks as that was the only option available.. but any insight as to what actually happened under the hood? The last thing I did was create a new share for the VM to use, link the iso, and click create on the Ubuntu template screen. Thanks in advance for any insight here – currently waiting for the read check to complete and hoping that I can restore things. Update – so after looking through the logs it seems there was some kind of error with my cache disk (dev/sdc, BTRFS). The share I created for the VM was set to use the cache disk, was that incorrect of me to do? Realizing I should have started the VM bare bones to get it working. tayshserve-diagnostics-20221012-1301.zip

Shout out to @Josh.5 – I've had this running for about 3 weeks now. I only have 4TB of space on my server so space is precious. So far I've been able to reduce my media library by about 500GB – and I honestly don't think I've hit the half way mark as far as files processed. Over 1,300 successful conversions so far with no failures. 👍

Is this better/different than CPU pinning?

Just got this running – was pretty straight forward referencing the screenshots provided by @bom5EUl, thanks for those. What's everyone's strategy for running this? I have it fired up with 1 worker and it has my CPU slammed at 98%. Obviously it's not practical for me to run this all day so I was considering using Custom User Scripts to start/stop the container on a schedule. Any possible downsides to this method? Also, I have a Ryzen 2200G (4 cores) – should I be slammed this hard? Update – ended up mucking with the CPU pinning features to give unmanic access to 2 cores, and Plex access to the other 2. Definitely helps but I think I'll still want this to run outside of peak usage for my server – basically just not during the evening.

Was hoping you would resolve this, thanks for posting. I don’t really have time to tinker so I was forced to just rollback and wait. Anyway... huge help, thank you