Dear Unraid experts,

As a newcomer to Unraid (and newcomer managing a server as well), I want to suggest a small but important improvement to the already very useful wiki ! Especially to us, being non-experts with no long experience in managing servers it would further help to prevent problems.

 

As I recently wanted to shrink my disk array from 4 disks to 3 disks, I found the following:

https://wiki.unraid.net/Shrink_array#Procedure_2

 

Great to have a step by step procedure, you can follow after reading it and confirmation (to yourself) you have understood what you have read....

 

But I think - especially for us beginners - it is important to add one more step at the beginning:

 

step zero:

Make sure you have a good backup of all the necessary data you would need to recover the complete server !

 

Recently I experienced that a script (a different one than used in the procedure above), which is used for many years from the community without any problems, on my old hardware made the server crash (completely unresponsive) before the script finished. The result was a loss of functionality, which I only could recover with good backups - and the great help from experts here in the Unraid forum...

 

So, I think the above procedure would deserve the extra bullet point at the beginning. Although taking backups might be standard routine for the experts.... for beginners it is NOT! They are usually busy enough to learn all the new technical stuff and not concentrate with number 1 priority on backups...

 

Thank you for your kind understanding

Just to point out that is not part of the ‘Official’ documentation that you can get to via the ‘Manual’ link at the bottom of the GUI.  As such it is user maintained.

Whatever you are doing, or even if you aren't doing anything, you must have a good (enough) backup. Parity is not a substitute.

 

You must always have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable. You get to decide what that is.