I am coming from a Synology / Xpenology set of NAS, have been evaluating TrueNAS scale and really like what unraid has to offer.

 

I believe the unraid style of aggregate volumes with parity makes sense for me for media volumes. That said I rely on BTRFS snapshots and the previous volumes feature it enabled in windows 10.  I don't have complicated snapshot requirements, and could live with something simple say one snap a day, keep the last 7 days worth before they are auto purged.

 

Is something like this possible with addins or even a little command line configuration? I wouldn't want something that was so far out of best practices that a simple patching would likely endanger my data / functionality

 

 

You can take snapshots manually with the CLI (or a script) or use for example the snapshots plugin, just keep in mind that with Unraid each array device is an independent filesystem, so if a share spans more than one device they will be in multiple filesystems/snapshots, as for previous volumes with Windows they should work as long as the correct Samba options are set, it's something I never tried but I think I've seen in the forums before.

So, let’s say I use BTRFS for each individual disk in my unraid style volume

 

I cron’d a job to take a daily snapshot on each disk at the same time.

 I created a share for media and included all those disks.
Writing to that share would result in files distributed among those disks, but I wouldn’t know it because unraid shows An aggregate view

 

Would I see a similar aggregate view inside the previous version view into that share?

 

I realize I can try this out for myself, but I hope I am still in the area that is not unheard of with unraid 

16 minutes ago, mervincm said:

Would I see a similar aggregate view inside the previous version view into that share?

Yep, as long as you access the snapshot as user share, unless something with previous versions Samba settings prevents that, it's something I never tried myself.

Hmmm this is getting closer to a possible solution then. Thank you. I will see what I have for spare parts to do a proof of concept. 

I have 3x4TB array devices and a single SSDpool device as a cache.

My disk1/2 and cache are configured BTRFS

I installed the plugin above and created snaps on all three disks at the root.

I can browse to the SMB share via windows, but there is no previous versions detected by windows.

I must be missing something.

 

 

6 hours ago, mervincm said:

but there is no previous versions detected by windows.

like mentioned:

On 4/6/2022 at 7:59 AM, JorgeB said:

as for previous volumes with Windows they should work as long as the correct Samba options are set

 

I use snapshots but never tried Windows previous versions, you'll need to google what's needed, for example:

 

https://michlstechblog.info/blog/samba-setup-for-windows-previous-versions-support/

Thanks for the link. I am searching and playing with it. This is something home NAS solutions have that just works by default, so I imagine unraid users / team have found a way. Most users still have Windows desktops. Previous versions is a decade old solution to remove access barriers to snapshot copies. This pattern shouldn’t be an uphill battle, I just need to find it.