Moving from an older Windows 10 system to Unraid. I'm terrified.

[csimpson]

TLDR; Moving from a Windows 10 fileserver to Unraid and I'm nervous about data loss, accidentally clicking something wrong and wiping out my data.

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First time poster here and I am looking to move from my Windows 10 server to an Unraid setup.

 

I've built PC's since the mid 90's back during DOS and a 386SX33 without even so much as a math coprocessor.

I used to play and tinker all day long. I had the time. But I don't have as much time anymore and back then, if I lost my data, I'd just take a floppy disk, Iomega Zip or Jazz disc, CD-R/DVD-R or whatever I had used to back up my stuff and rebuild.. Disaster recovery was pretty easy and straight forward. 

 

But now I have decades of accumulated digital treasures. Hours and hours of tinkering with DMAs and IRQs and swapping jumpers has been replaced with being a dad, a husband, working full-time and just being a grown-up. And in the process, I've managed to collect thousands of hours of video content and tens of thousands of photos. Additionally and less fulfilling, but very important,  financial documents and statements that are necessary to keep. 

 

My current setup is a Windows 10 box with a 120GB SSD with the OS and a few apps installed on it. Apps such as Plex and DisqueTV. The system also has two 4TB internal spinning drives. One drive is a media/storage drive and the other is a nightly sync using Syncback.  From there, I have an external 4TB drive that I sync to once a month(ish) and store offsite. There are multiple levels of simple redundancy. OS Drive fails, replace it without affecting the media. Media drive fails? It can be replaced and then copied from the sync drive.  Both drives fail? restore from the external drive. And it's easy.  I can take any of the three hard drives and connect it to pretty much any computer and have access to my files. Peace of mind. This system has been running for over 10 years with periodic hard drive upgrades..

 

So far, it's worked very well, however, Windows 10 is getting long in the tooth and the old video card is less than reliable.

 

Additionally, I'm at the point where I'm 95% full on the internal drives and am finding that I'm deleting files to free up more space.  So I went out and purchased an 8TB drive and a 14TB external drive.  The idea was that I'd replace the main 4TB media/storage drive with the new 8TB drive. I'd take the two existing 4TB drives, span them together in Windows and use that as the sync drive. The 14TB external drive would replace the existing backup.  Essentially, same system, double the storage. 

But then I started thinking, wait, should I do this as a proper NAS not running Windows Home? Enter Unraid.

I've got Unraid on a 16GB USB stick and it's currently preclearing the 8TB drive. Once that's done, as I understand it I should make the new 8TB drive the parity drive and then the two 4TB drives will become disk 1 and disk 2. And then once I'm comfortable with that, I'll take my 120GB SSD and turn it into a cache drive.

But I'm almost terrified.  Even though I have an external backup of my windows 10 drive, I wonder "how do I sync a drive to my external drive using Unraid but then connect to my mac and access the files if the Unraid system fails?" or that I've read about people who have a drive failure and then they rebuild their system and because the wrong button was clicked, POOF! Data is gone.

I'm very comfortable with Windows. I can reliably get my piceless files back with various levels of redundancy. Unraid is making me nervous but so far, everyone who's moved from Windows to unraid loves it! I'm hopeful that horror stories are isolated, but I'd love to have a more robust system than what Windows can offer.

Anyways, that's my intro! 

Edited April 21 by csimpson
fixed a typo

[Hoopster]

26 minutes ago, csimpson said:

"how do I sync a drive to my external drive using Unraid but then connect to my mac and access the files if the Unraid system fails?

I do this same thing with an NTFS (Windows) formatted drive with the Unassigned Devices plugin

 

I have about 40 TB of Unraid Array storage but I sync the most important files (photos, family videos, some movies, etc.) to an 18TB external drive via unassigned devices.  Since it is NTFS, it can be read directly and natively in Windows. APFS (Apple File System) is also supported with the Unassigned Devices Plus plugin.

 

I also have a backup Unraid server and I back up the entire array (well, just the new or modified files) to the backup server once a week via a script in User Scripts

 

 

Edited April 21 by Hoopster

[csimpson]

13 hours ago, Hoopster said:

I do this same thing with an NTFS (Windows) formatted drive with the Unassigned Devices plugin

 

I have about 40 TB of Unraid Array storage but I sync the most important files (photos, family videos, some movies, etc.) to an 18TB external drive via unassigned devices.  Since it is NTFS, it can be read directly and natively in Windows. APFS (Apple File System) is also supported with the Unassigned Devices Plus plugin.

 

I also have a backup Unraid server and I back up the entire array (well, just the new or modified files) to the backup server once a week via a script in User Scripts

 

 

Good to know! I already have the unassigned devices plugin installed. I'll be looking into that. 

One question I have and am having a hard time wrapping my head around despite reading tutorials. If I have an 8TB parity drive and two 4TB drives, I believe that I'll have 8TB of data storage available and it'll be protected by the parity drive.  However, if I add another 4TB drive, (not parity) would I then have 12TB of protected data?

The math doesn't add up for me.

Also, does unraid have some sort of "recycle bin" for accidentally deleted items? I really like Apple's Time Machine and how it functions to restore older data. Would love it if something like that was available for unraid?
 

[Hoopster]

1 hour ago, csimpson said:

However, if I add another 4TB drive, (not parity) would I then have 12TB of protected data?

Yes.  You can add as many data drives as you wish up to 8TB in size since you have an 8TB parity drive.  In fact, you are "wasting" space if you just keep adding 4TB drives.  A parity rebuild is always going to have to rebuild the full 8TB even if your largest data drive is 4TB.

 

1 hour ago, csimpson said:

The math doesn't add up for me.

There is no math to add up.  The parity drive just has to be as large or larger than the single largest data drive.  It does not have to be as large as all the data drives added up.

 

I have one 8TB parity drive that protects five 8TB data drives (40 TB).  Parity protects against data loss due to a disk failure but is not a data backup. The Parity drive contains no actual data, it has no filesystem.  It is just a bucket of bits of calculated 1s and 0s that represent the data stored in the same location across all data drives.  To rebuild a failed data drive, the parity drive plus all other data drives are needed so the rebuild process knows whether to write a 1 or 0 in a particular location on the new data disk.

 

1 hour ago, csimpson said:

does unraid have some sort of "recycle bin"

There is a plugin for that.  I have never used it so I do not know how well it works.

 

Edited April 22 by Hoopster

[csimpson]

1 hour ago, Hoopster said:

Yes.  You can add as many data drives as you wish up to 8TB in size since you have an 8TB parity drive.  In fact, you are "wasting" space if you just keep adding 4TB drives.  A parity rebuild is always going to have to rebuild the full 8TB even if your largest data drive is 4TB.

 

There is no math to add up.  The parity drive just has to be as large or larger than the single largest data drive.  It does not have to be as large as all the data drives added up.

 

I have one 8TB parity drive that protects five 8TB data drives (40 TB).  Parity protects against data loss due to a disk failure but is not a data backup. The Parity drive contains no actual data, it has no filesystem.  It is just a bucket of bits of calculated 1s and 0s that represent the data stored in the same location across all data drives.  To rebuild a failed data drive, the parity drive plus all other data drives are needed so the rebuild process knows whether to write a 1 or 0 in a particular location on the new data disk.

 

There is a plugin for that.  I have never used it so I do not know how well it works.

 

So then, moving forward, an additional 8TB drive would give me a total of 16TB of storage (two 4TB and an 8TB), and the parity drive will protect against a single drive failure.

With the current setup, I suppose then that if the two 4TB data drives failed, the parity drive wouldn't be able to rebuild the data.

I suppose the risk with Unraid is that if the SATA controller decides to flip out and error up all the data drives, that's when the NTFS backup or APFS backup is good to have.

Another question (thank-you by the way).  I have Unraid running off a 16GB USB stick currently.  If I wanted to have a Plex server, etc, does it make sense to have a larger USB key, or does the data get stored on the spinning disk?

 

Edited April 22 by csimpson

[JonathanM]

2 hours ago, csimpson said:

However, if I add another 4TB drive, (not parity) would I then have 12TB of protected data?

The math doesn't add up for me.

Hoopster summed it up quite well, but I wanted to stick my .02 into the discussion to hopefully clear this up a little more.

 

Parity doesn't hold any data. Period. It's not a backup. Period.

 

It contains the missing bit in the equation formed by adding up the bits in an address row. Pick any arbitrary data offset, say drive1 has a 0, drive2 has a 1, drive3 has a 1, drive4 has a 1, so parity would need to be a 1 to make the column add up to 0. Remove any SINGLE drive, and do the math to make the equation 0 again, and you know what bit belongs in that column of the missing drive.

 

So, you can protect ANY number of drives, and as long as you only lose 1 drive, the rest of the drives PLUS PARITY can recreate that ONE missing drive. Lose 2 drives, and you lose the content of both, but since Unraid doesn't stripe across drives, you only lose the failed drives.

 

Unraid has the capability to use two parity drives, so you can recover from 2 simultaneous failures. However, the second parity is a much more complex math equation that takes into account which position the drives are in, so it's a little more computationally intensive. The extra math is trivial for most all modern processors.

[JonathanM]

2 minutes ago, csimpson said:

I have Unraid running off a 16GB USB stick currently. 

It's more correct to think of the USB stick as firmware with space for storing changed settings. Unraid loads into and runs from RAM, it only touches the USB stick when you change settings.

 

Container appdata and executables should live on a SSD or multiples for redundancy, separate from the main storage Unraid array. Legacy documentation and videos will refer to that storage space as "cache", now it's more properly referred to as a "pool" of which you can create as many as make sense for the desired speed and redundancy.

[Hoopster]

9 hours ago, csimpson said:

an additional 8TB drive would give me a total of 16TB of storage (two 4TB and an 8TB), and the parity drive will protect against a single drive failure.

Correct.  Unraid supports dual parity (optional) which can protect against the simultaneous loss of two data drives.

 

9 hours ago, csimpson said:

I have Unraid running off a 16GB USB stick currently.  If I wanted to have a Plex server, etc, does it make sense to have a larger USB key, or does the data get stored on the spinning disk?

 

The USB flash drive holds Unraid files unpacked into RAM o boot, configuration files, and the license.  If you setup Plex, it is common to have docker container appdata, VMs etc. on SSDs so no data disks need to be spinning for docker containers/VMs to access their needed configuration files.  I actually take it one step further because I had an extra small SSD.  I put Plex appdata on its own dedicated SSD.  This is certainly not necessary but lets me isolate Plex database/config files for maintenance purposes.

Edited April 22 by Hoopster

[csimpson]

That makes sense.  Gotcha. 

My 8TB is nearly done the post check for preclearing. The other two drives (4TB) that I took from from Windows system have data on them, but there wasn't an option to preclear them?  Is preclearing only necessary for the parity drive?

Also, if I have an SSD as the cache drive (or as understand it, now a pool) does that also get tied to the parity drive? Or do I need a second cache drive to be the parity drive.

Edited April 23 by csimpson

[_cjd_]

If you want drive failure protection for an SSD cache you need a more traditional raid setup... With a plain mirror being the most direct solution. It is not protected by parity and doesn't have that as a pool option (nor do you want to use SSD in a parity slot)

[csimpson]

27 minutes ago, _cjd_ said:

If you want drive failure protection for an SSD cache you need a more traditional raid setup... With a plain mirror being the most direct solution. It is not protected by parity and doesn't have that as a pool option (nor do you want to use SSD in a parity slot)

Not really, I just didn't know if the cache drive was tied to the parity drive at all. Almost like if I have the 8TB parity, two 4TB spinning discs and then another 120GB SSD, would the entire array be 8,120TB including the SSD.

[primeval_god]

4 hours ago, csimpson said:

Not really, I just didn't know if the cache drive was tied to the parity drive at all. Almost like if I have the 8TB parity, two 4TB spinning discs and then another 120GB SSD, would the entire array be 8,120TB including the SSD.

The term "Array" is old nomenclature that refers to the singular required drive pool that uses the unRAID's proprietary unRAID scheme. The "Array" pool can contain mixed drive sizes and types (though mixing SSDs and HDDs in not recommended), as well as up to 2 parity drives to maintain redundancy for the pool. unRAID also supports optional secondary drive pools (previously called cache, but weren't a cache in a typically sense of the word). These secondary pools can be single disks or have redundancy via ZFS or BTRFS software raid levels. These secondary pools are separate from the "Array" pools in terms of redundancy. In terms of file access unRAID has user shares which preset a combined view of folders from all the various drive pools. There are options to set which pool data gets written to when writing to a user share and when and if data gets moved between pools. One common usage of this is to direct all writes to an SSD pool and then have unRAID move the files onto the Array pool later. 
Finally to the point above, the general recommendation is to have an SSD based pool to store appdata on, separate from the Array. Whether or not the pool used to store appdata has redundancy is up to you but it does not effect the configuration of the "Array" pool. 

[csimpson]

1 hour ago, primeval_god said:

The term "Array" is old nomenclature that refers to the singular required drive pool that uses the unRAID's proprietary unRAID scheme. The "Array" pool can contain mixed drive sizes and types (though mixing SSDs and HDDs in not recommended), as well as up to 2 parity drives to maintain redundancy for the pool. unRAID also supports optional secondary drive pools (previously called cache, but weren't a cache in a typically sense of the word). These secondary pools can be single disks or have redundancy via ZFS or BTRFS software raid levels. These secondary pools are separate from the "Array" pools in terms of redundancy. In terms of file access unRAID has user shares which preset a combined view of folders from all the various drive pools. There are options to set which pool data gets written to when writing to a user share and when and if data gets moved between pools. One common usage of this is to direct all writes to an SSD pool and then have unRAID move the files onto the Array pool later. 
Finally to the point above, the general recommendation is to have an SSD based pool to store appdata on, separate from the Array. Whether or not the pool used to store appdata has redundancy is up to you but it does not effect the configuration of the "Array" pool. 

Thank-you so much for clarifying. I've ordered a new 480GB Sata SSD for the SSD pool and should be arriving tomorrow.

So my 8TB parity drive in precleared, the two 4TB drives are in the case (can't seem to preclear them, but from what I've ready this happens automatically now with unraid) and the 480GB drive will be set up a a cache pool and will hold appdata, plex, etc. 

Are there any videos that are newer that can help walk through a similar setup to this?  Most videos I've watched are older and it's mixing me up with the terminology.  Would love to get started on the right foot!

Edited April 23 by csimpson

[Frank1940]

Please understand that Unraid by itself is not a backup.  It can be a part of a backup but not as a single copy of valuable/irreplaceable data.  See here for a discussion:

 

         https://forums.unraid.net/topic/130726-unraid-os-version-6113-available/page/5/#comment-1206692

 

Edited April 24 by Frank1940

[csimpson]

So I'm well into the process now and Unraid is either highlightiing a lot of issues that Windows was able to work through and not shout about, or I had a ticking time bomb and Unraid is shining light on it.

 

The first issue was that I purchased a new 480GB SSD.  Once I hooked it up, it gave me errors. I posted in another thread with the diagnostics, but never heard back. 

So I removed the drive and sent it back to Amazon. Not an issue I wanted to deal with in a new drive. 

So I've had to Tools > New Config a few times. Just poking and prodding.  

I finally had my two 4TB drives set up as disk 1 and disk 2. I eliminated the parity drive for the initial data transfer and was unable to preclear the disks, but did format them to xfs.  I did preclear the brand new 8TB drive.

I transferred all the data to the drives yesterday.  3.7TB in total across the 8TB array. Everything seemed good!

And then the parity check started. 

Well, I'm now looking at 524 errors on disk 2 and after looking through the forums, I'm seeing that one of the downfalls of unraid is that when doing the scheduled parity syncs, there's no way to know if it's the pariy drive that's a problem or not.  There's also no way of knowing what files are an issue unless you're using something like Dynamix File Integrity. But even then, lots of comments of frustration that it's not accurate and a Google search brings up threads from 2 years ago about the plugin reliability. But that might be outdated.  But then there's the debate of xfs vs zfs but unraid prefers xfs.

It's a pandora's box of indecision.  I'd like like a configuration that can keep my home videos/photos and important documents safe and secure without uploading them to the Amazon or Google cloud gods.  

Like I said, maybe I had a ticking time bomb before and I'm now aware of it. Perhaps disk 2 needs to be replaced. But then, do I take out disk two, wipe the drives and start over from my backups?  Or once parity is completed, do I just swap the drives? The backup drive should be good as it came from a drive without issues and is showing no errors.  But now that content is in unraid, it's showing those 524 errors and I don't know if the files are compromised or not (or how to tell what files they may be?)

Edited April 26 by csimpson

[Frank1940]

Post your Diagnostics file (the entire .zip file) in a NEW post in this thread.  It will provide much more information about what is going on. 

 

Next, take a deep breath.  I am going to provide a link to the Unraid manual.  I would suggest that you take a couple of hours and peruse it.  

 

    https://docs.unraid.net/category/manual/

 

One more thing, Unraid needs healthy disks to be able to provide data protection.   Windows could care less less about disk health until it tries to use the actual area of a disk that has problems.  All Hard Disks will eventually fail!   How much of a headache such a failure will cause depends on the configuration of the storage.  Unraid provides protection against either one or two disks failures depending on whether you have one or two parity drives.  It also allows you to 'test' the array for problems on a periodical basis using the Parity Checks operation. 

 

Again, let me caution you!  There are a lot more ways to lose data than a simple hard disk failure.   As an example, your Unraid server could end up in the cloud with a little help from a tornado!    🙄   You need a minimum of two separate copies of every file.  Preferably with one of them being off-site!

[itimpi]

On 4/23/2024 at 8:38 PM, csimpson said:

the two 4TB drives are in the case (can't seem to preclear them, but from what I've ready this happens automatically now with unraid)

If you want to preclear them you first have to delete any partitions making it a two step process for drives which already contain a file system.   This limit it imposed to avoid accidentally clicking preclear and losing valuable data.

 

As you said the pre-clear is an optional (3rd party) feature - if necessary Unraid will clear any drive when it is added to the array.   You mention them having data on them but I presume you are happy for it to be wiped during the add by the Clear process?

[csimpson]

On 4/26/2024 at 8:42 AM, Frank1940 said:

Post your Diagnostics file (the entire .zip file) in a NEW post in this thread.  It will provide much more information about what is going on. 

 

Next, take a deep breath.  I am going to provide a link to the Unraid manual.  I would suggest that you take a couple of hours and peruse it.  

 

    https://docs.unraid.net/category/manual/

 

One more thing, Unraid needs healthy disks to be able to provide data protection.   Windows could care less less about disk health until it tries to use the actual area of a disk that has problems.  All Hard Disks will eventually fail!   How much of a headache such a failure will cause depends on the configuration of the storage.  Unraid provides protection against either one or two disks failures depending on whether you have one or two parity drives.  It also allows you to 'test' the array for problems on a periodical basis using the Parity Checks operation. 

 

Again, let me caution you!  There are a lot more ways to lose data than a simple hard disk failure.   As an example, your Unraid server could end up in the cloud with a little help from a tornado!    🙄   You need a minimum of two separate copies of every file.  Preferably with one of them being off-site!

Ironically, I just started a family vacation and we're in the US Mid-West, only a couple hours from the Tornado's that are punishing through Oklahoma and Kansas tonight!

I think I'm going to purchase two more 8TB drives and sett up a 16TB array with new, healthy drives and keep the one new 8TB as the parity drive. I'll use my new 12TB external drive to do backups mirrors until it's too large.  I'm going to take a look through the written manuals, but I much prefer video's as a visual aid (I learn better from visuals than text).

 

All that said, I'm not back for another week so won't be poking and prodding until then.

[itimpi]

16 hours ago, csimpson said:

but I much prefer video's as a visual aid (I learn better from visuals than text)

In which case look for the SpaceInvader One videos on Youtube that cover most aspects of Unraid.

[csimpson]

Okay, so I've watched a bunch of videos from Space Invader and have skimmed through the documentation.  I've now got three 8TB drives.  I copied all the data to the two 8TB drives from a backup drive and the Parity was not yet installed.  Everything seemed good - about 3.7TB of data.

I've now got it running a parity sync and is about 85% completed.  3-4 hours to go.

I have a share set up and I can browse to the unraid server. What's a little concerning is that one of my main folders has no files, just sub-folders.  I used binhex-krusader to do the transfer and all the folders are there. But none of the files in some of the directories.  I can confirm they are on the source drive though. 

Is this normal to not see files until the parity sync is complete for the first time?

Edited May 7 by csimpson

[csimpson]

Weird.  The parity sync is completed.  All the files are missing from my "Family" folder.  All the sub-folders are there and were created with the transfer from my external drive.

 

This is very concerning.

[primeval_god]

Can you see the files from the command line? If so the issue may be with permissions of the share and or the underlying data.

If the issue is permissions unRAID has a tool for correcting the permissions of your data. If you already have Docker apps setup the new permissions tool can cause issues, but there is a plugin (Fix Common Problems I think) that has a docker safe new permissions tool.

Edited May 7 by primeval_god

[csimpson]

I launched krusader again and copied the files over. This time they all showed up. But I do need to hunt through and see if anything else was missing from the copy. I just happened to notice these folders were missing 10,000 files.

I did download the Fix Common Problems plugin and that looks helpful. No errors, just a couple warnings.

1. Plugin Update Check not enabled

2. Docker Update Check not enabled

[csimpson]

Okay, I'm almost completely set up and going. I've got Plex running as well as DisqueTV for channels. Shares are mapped and everything seems to be going well. The last thing I'm trying to do is rsync to my external drive.

Using the terminal command:
 

rsync -av --delete "/mnt/user/Shared/" "/mnt/user/syncTest/"

Works perfectly fine. However, when trying to copy to my mounted external drive, I use the command:
 

rsync -av --delete "/mnt/user/Shared/" "/mnt/disks/Expansion/"

And I get the error message "Operation not permitted (1)"

Krusader works when trying to copy files to the External Drive. Not sure what I may be overlooking with rsync?

 

Edited May 8 by csimpson

[Frank1940]

1 hour ago, csimpson said:

And I get the error message "Operation not permitted (1)"

Get a screenshot of the GUI terminal after you run the following command:

ls -al "/mnt/disks/Expansion/"