nerdbot

Ok, I really shouldn't be surprised since I'm a tech guy by day and I understand the concepts - nearly everything is stored on disk, very little is on the flash drive and in memory - but to actually go from dead to back up and running with all my data and docker containers auto-starting in less than 20 minutes is still pretty damn impressive. And yes, I've already created and downloaded a flash backup. Thanks for the help everyone!

I did force some data to a specific disk. So if I understand you correctly, the process would be: 1.) Install the latest unraid on my new flash drives 2.) Boot to it and migrate my key 3.) Assign disks as you mentioned (parity to parity1, cache to cache slot, the rest of the data disks however I want) 4.) Run a parity correcting check (I started with the live CD before I saw your post, so I didn't mount read-only) 5.) Recreate whatever setup I have that forced data to specific disks Does that sound about right?

Sorry, to clarify - I'm not concerned about recovering the key, I have that file in my email still. My concern is that I don't have a recent backup of my disk configuration and the wiki says that to prevent data loss, I'll need to assign my disks in the exact same configuration, and if I don't know which disks are assigned where, to post in the forums. I just used a live CD, as jonathanm suggested, to take a look at my disks and unfortunately, it looks like I wasn't making regular backups of my USB disk after all. I only have app data backups. I was able to determine which disk is my parity disk (the only one that didn't mount), and which disk is my cache disk (SSD), but that still leaves 5 other disks I'm not sure what to do with.

I shutdown my Unraid server today to do some unrelated electrical work in the room - I decided it was "better" to do a shutdown than feel pressured by the UPS it was connected to while I worked on the electrical - and when I tried to boot the system back up it wouldn't boot. Turns out the flash drive (32GB SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 flash drive) is dead. In addition to my Unraid server, I can't get my Chromebook, Macbook, or PC to detect the flash drive. Of course, now I see a reddit post that says stay away from the USB 3.1 models because they have a tendency to overheat and fail early. 🤦‍♂️ I have another identical 32GB SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 flash drive, but I think I'm going to avoid using it and order the Sandisk Cruzer Fit USB 2.0 recommended by the Unraid wiki. I do have 1 backup of my Unraid config, but it's dated December 2018 (Unraid 6.6.5), and contains my trial license. I didn't buy the Pro key until January 2019. I also know for sure my disk configuration changed a bit since December. I upgraded a couple drives from 2TB to 8TB, including my parity drive, and I think I moved some disks around from the original setup. I did install the CA Appdata Backup / Restore plugin, and I'm pretty sure I was making regular backups of my USB drive via a CA app, however they're on my unraid server that I can't currently access. Also, I am currently on the latest stable version (6.7.2). While I wait for my new USB flash drive to arrive, I'd like to make sure I get the next steps right so I can avoid using up all my recovery chances and avoid the hassle of contacting support to recover my key again. What would be the best way to proceed? Thanks in advance!

Hi xhaloz, thanks for the response. I went back to working on my rsnapshot script to backup the devices in the house to the Unraid server, then got sidetracked with some other issues with Unraid as well as just busy in my regular day-to-day, so I haven't reached the off-site portion of my backup plan yet. I'll definitely look into the links you provided. Re: Duplicacy, I would just need the CLI license, which is $20/year for the license?

Hi all, I've been evaluating Unraid for about a week now and, for my needs, I'm quite impressed. I'll most likely be picking up a license soon. I've already installed the Community Applications, Nerd Tools, CA Backup/Restore, and Unassigned Devices plugins and configured them. About a decade back, I setup a simple home backup using rsnapshot on a Linux server and rsync installed on the Windows and Mac computers in my house. I liked having daily, weekly, and monthly incremental backups, but I was missing the offsite portion of any good backup system. Cloud storage was still relatively new/expensive for consumers, and I wasn't aware of any easy way to encrypt/decrypt what I stored in the cloud. Fast forward to now and I see there are so many options, so I'm revisiting the idea, especially now with Unraid. I plan to use rsnapshot again on my Unraid server, keeping daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots on the array. I'd only be using this setup for really important files (family pictures, important documents, etc), so I don't expect this storage to grow too quickly in size (I'm looking at about 100GB right now). With rsnapshot and local storage, these snapshots are space efficient by using hard links for files that haven't changed between backups, but it's not clear to me how I'd achieve the same thing in cloud storage. From the research I've done so far, I should be able to just use something like Rclone, Duplicati, or Borg and upload the latest weekly backup (assuming the top level directory name remains unchanged). Rclone/Duplicati/Borg will determine which files have changed and only upload those files to the cloud storage service like Backblaze or CrashPlan, and then Backblaze/Crashplan will handle versioning the file for me. So I won't explicitly have daily, weekly and monthly rsnapshot directories in cloud storage, but instead I'll be able to see different versions of files as they change over time. Does that sound about right? If so, will I be able to do this with any cloud storage service, or is there a particular feature I need to look for when choosing a company? Or maybe a better question is, is there a better way to achieve my goal? (I realize it's possible rsnapshot is a really old way of doing things)