Hi all, a bit of a preface for my questions here. I'm a IT Security specialist but have been stuck in the Windows/AD side of the sector for about 25 years. That means unfortunately, I've skipped "Linux day" for about that long and my neophyte *nix skills have atrophied pretty badly.

That being said, I'm starting to fix that by learning UnRAID and moving my home lab over to an UnRAID system.

Built myself a fairly decent machine and the hardware has been working fairly decently so far, waiting on a new Power Supply to arrive to route my cables properly and button it up.

I've been watching SpaceInvaderOne and JuanMTech's videos and have been finding them very informative, but as always, the more I learn the more questions I have.

I'm moving an older stand-along Plex server into a docker in Unraid. Some questions I have:

First, I created a share for all of my Plex media, but didn't allocate them between drives very well due to mis-counting the . Currently, disk1 and disk2 have a /plex folder, but disk3 does not - everything was allocated to disk1 and disk2 via the plex share. If I create a folder on disk3 named /plex via cli under /mnt/disk3, will I need to adjust my plex share, or should it pick it up and see disk3's /plex folder automatically as part of the "collection" of folders inlcuded in the share? I'm still learning how the btrfs file system works here.

Question 2: To completely refresh a docker app and install it new, it appears I need to manually remove the docker's files under the appdata share. I uninstalled the Plex docker but it left those files behind.

Question 3 (might be more of a Linux question): When I do a "move" command, it appears that it's leaving empty folders behind in the old location that I have to remove manually. Is this normal? It seems I'm probably just missing a command line switch.

 

Thanks for helping a old tech dog learn (and re-learn) new tricks.

Unraid is a stripped down, custom, slackware linux NAS OS with VM and docker hosting. It is not intended to be a general purpose, multi-user Linux. If you really want to work with Linux you can create a VM.

 

For most purposes, you shouldn't need to work with Unraid at the command line, and can get in trouble if you do until you get a better idea of some things to avoid.

 

Attach Diagnostics to your NEXT post in this thread.

Thanks.  I don't really have diagnostics because I'm not having a problem. I'm asking some questions I had before problems occur. As I said, I'm not having any hardware issues at this time.

I'll keep that in mind that most of the time I won't need to work with Unraid that the cli.  However, it does appear that some movement of files in and out of the system without specifically utilizing the shares interface is desirable (per SpaceInvaderOne's videos), so long as I don't move share to disk or vice versa, only disk to disk or share to share.

So one of my questions was regarding moving files and how the filesystem worked to cover that with shares - will creating the folder on disk3 automatically be picked up by the share, or do I need to adjust the share setting somehow? Your answer indicates I shouldn't be doing that at all. Currently, my data on my UnRAID system is all duplicate.

And yes, I'll be running VMs for actual Linux knowledge growth, configuration, and exploration of security concepts in Linux. I just wanted to state where I was currently at, that I'm not a complete neophyte with all this, but the system is unfamiliar to me at this point still.

Good to know that it's a stripped down Slackware distro. That's actually one of the distros I used back in the day when I was first working with it.

1 hour ago, Alyred said:

First, I created a share for all of my Plex media, but didn't allocate them between drives very well due to mis-counting the . Currently, disk1 and disk2 have a /plex folder, but disk3 does not - everything was allocated to disk1 and disk2 via the plex share. If I create a folder on disk3 named /plex via cli under /mnt/disk3, will I need to adjust my plex share, or should it pick it up and see disk3's /plex folder automatically as part of the "collection" of folders inlcuded in the share? I'm still learning how the btrfs file system works here.

 

If you want to the share plex saves files to the disk3, you have to set it up in the share configuration. 

 

In the included disk you choose all the disk that will storage files from this share.

 

1 hour ago, Alyred said:

Question 2: To completely refresh a docker app and install it new, it appears I need to manually remove the docker's files under the appdata share. I uninstalled the Plex docker but it left those files behind.

 

It's always better to delete the appdata manually after remove the conteiner. You can use krusader or the new dynamix file manager to delete the folder.

1 hour ago, Alyred said:

Question 3 (might be more of a Linux question): When I do a "move" command, it appears that it's leaving empty folders behind in the old location that I have to remove manually. Is this normal? It seems I'm probably just missing a command line switch.

 

Stick to using the gui with krusader e dynamix for the better and easier approach.

49 minutes ago, Alyred said:

don't really have diagnostics because I'm not having a problem. I'm asking some questions

Diagnostics would tell me more about your current configuration and I could make recommendations based on that.

48 minutes ago, Ricardo Maranhao said:

 

If you want to the share plex saves files to the disk3, you have to set it up in the share configuration. 

 

In the included disk you choose all the disk that will storage files from this share.

 

Thanks!  Got that in the share config (all disks is selected) but I selected the split option to be at 4 instead of 3 (I miscounted) so instead of (in this case) allowing the television folder to split different shows (but keeping each show on the same disk), it put them all on one disk.

So the share is configured correctly (and now has the proper split level defined), but I was wondering if I moved the shows manually (cli, krusader, or dynamix - thanks for the tip) if the share would then see them or not. It hasn't yet created a directory there and I don't have anything new to copy to it at the moment.

I'm considering just setting up a new share specifically for TV and the like and may just copy share->share and have it re-distribute it automatically. Just considering the most efficient way to do these for future, and what's possible. And again... learning a bit how the system works in the process.

 

So far as moving, I did use Krusader and it wouldn't remove the old directories, period. The files moved successfully from an old cache drive to a new one after the share location changed, but it would NOT remove the old directories on the old share and "Fix Common Problems" continued to throw warnings on it. Removing the folders from the cache manually got it cleared up, but couldn't figure out why Krusader wouldn't remove those folders.

 

I'll give Dynamix a shot!

53 minutes ago, Ricardo Maranhao said:

 

It's always better to delete the appdata manually after remove the conteiner. You can use krusader or the new dynamix file manager to delete the folder.

And thanks for answering this as well.  Figured this might be the  case (in case you needed or accidentally removed a docker you could get the data back) but wanted to make sure this was the proper way to go about it.