UNRAID across Multiple sites?


lux

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Hello,

 

My grandmother recently passed away. My family have decided to keep her home abroad and use it as a holiday home / weekend escape.

 

Currently I have an 8 bay QNAP at home (UK) in a raid 6 array, which I use for my media collection. How would the forum advise me to proceed if I wanted to have my media collection *also* in my family home abroad (Spain), so that everyone who used it would be able to enjoy my media?

 

On one hand, the super easy solution would be to just have an Nvidia shield at the home abroad point to my plex server at home.

 

However, whenever I have tested this travelling (US / EU), the quality was always quite poor (probably hotel WiFi, but still). 

 

I feel like this would be a great opportunity to get a brand new 12 bay 3U chassis, use unraid, and then somehow use my QNAP in Spain as the backup device.

 

That way those using the family home abroad will be able to use the media locally. And if anything ever went wrong with my ‘main’ server, I have an offsite backup.

 

From what I’ve read, unraid doesn’t support hot standby disks, so if there was a disk parity failure, or data disk failure, it may be several weeks before I got the opportunity to get out the house and fix it. 

 

So I feel that the best overall solution would be unraid at UK home, QNAP raid 6 abroad, with rtrr between the two to sync data.

 

But I’ve zero experience with unraid, hence looking for advice! What’s the forums thoughts?

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Hi, welcome.

Let's clarify on a few on your assumptions fist:

In general you run an array (parity based) and some btrfs pools (raid based).  Depending on the setup you have 1-2 Disks for the Parity array and whatever you define on raid level which can fail without effecting your data.
If a disk fails, you can replace it using hot-swap... Or you can also "preinstall" a disk into unraid, but not use it for any array. Once a disk fails, you could stop the array and replace it (inside the configuration, not physically!) with the spare. This operations takes less than a minute and unraid will begin to reconstruct the data to your spare disk. The reconstruction can take a while, but your data is AVAILABLE all the the time!

 

As for Plex; I do use a similar setup and travel more often than I am close to my media. I do not struggle to stream anywhere in the world - if you do, it is probably due to your upload bandwidth on your server (usually ISP based). Having that in mind, it takes significantly more time to actually synchronize data compared to streaming a reduced (adopted to the available bandwidth, which plex does for you) just part of it...

 

An offsite backup IS a good idea, but it is not how/why you would address your actually topics.

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On 8/4/2021 at 6:03 AM, Jaster said:

replace it using hot-swap

Unraid will not do anything with the replacement until you assign it, and you can't assign it with the array started. So no point in plugging/unplugging array disks under power and some risk to trying that.

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if you have a second windows PC in the same house you can Remote into the windows machine, open chrome and access the unraid system "locally",  take the array offline, assign the new drive, and start the array.

 

that 2nd machine cannot be a VM on the array.  VMs and  docker containers go offline when array is down.

Edited by TRusselo
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