How to protect data in cache drive

[stoigeboiii]

I marked appdata as preferred for my cache drive and only just realized that the cache drive is not included in the parity protection. Is there a way to get either a rollback backup of my appdata that is protected by parity or a way to have my cache drive's data included in the parity protection?

 

Any help would be great thank you!

[itimpi]

If you want the cache to be ‘protected’ then you need to have multiple drives in the cache.  It is never part of the array parity.

 

there is also a plugin for doing periodic backups of appdata to a location you specify.

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, stoigeboiii said:

a rollback backup of my appdata that is protected by parity

The way you worded that concerns me that you are expecting parity to be able to recover individual files. Unraid's parity doesn't do that, it doesn't contain any backup files.

https://wiki.unraid.net/Parity

[Hoopster]

2 hours ago, stoigeboiii said:

a way to have my cache drive's data included in the parity protection?

By design, the cache drive is excluded from parity protection or there would not be much point in using it to cache writes.  Caching specifically bypasses parity to increase initial write speed to the array by delaying parity writes to whenever the Mover runs.

 

If your primary use of the cache drive is for appdata, as mentioned by others you can create a cache pool with two or more drives in a RAID 1 mirror (the default) for cache drive redundancy or use the CA Appdata Backup/Restore plugin to periodically backup appdata elsewhere.

[dopeytree]

I don't quite get the cache feature... it seems to be a separate SSD that can be used to fast write too & from.

You can also make shares stay on the cache or be used as the copy buffer..

 

Surely it would be better if it was ALWAYS copied off SSD onto the array by default during it's mover script.

 

It should be called Turbo SSD or something rather than cache which implies it WILL be moving somewhere else.

 

If one chooses prefer cache then that share is never backed up by native unraid unless you choose to have another SSD as a pool backup.

However most people will run a script that backs the cache only folders to the array.

 

Really this should be built into unraid.

Edited August 23, 2022 by dopeytree