unraid as backup versus sharing files?

[chuga]

Hi

 

I have my first unraid box up and running this week, and quite a few of my files (movies/pictures/etc) moved over.

 

My current practice (before setting up unraid) was to store all movies/pictures on my C drive and use SyncToy to mirror copies to a D and E drive (so I actually have 3 copies of everything).  The irritating thing was my computer has to be on for anyone to access pictures/movies.  One of the reasons I wanted the unraid server was to leave it on and then pictures/movies will be accessible at any time to any computer in the house.

 

My concern is that with the freedom for everyone in my family to access/view/etc the unraid files they are at risk for being deleted/corrupted.

 

I guess my question is what is the best way to handle this.  I supposed I could create two copies of all files on the unraid server - one in shared folders and one in hidden folders and someone sync them occasionally.    Or I could use synctoy on my windows machine and occasionally pull off copies back to my computer.

 

Any ideas or suggestions on best strategy to make files accessible and also decrease risk of deletion?

 

 

 

thanks for your help!

[Joe L.]

My concern is that with the freedom for everyone in my family to access/view/etc the unraid files they are at risk for being deleted/corrupted.

 

I guess my question is what is the best way to handle this.  I supposed I could create two copies of all files on the unraid server - one in shared folders and one in hidden folders and someone sync them occasionally.    Or I could use synctoy on my windows machine and occasionally pull off copies back to my computer.

 

Any ideas or suggestions on best strategy to make files accessible and also decrease risk of deletion?

 

 

 

thanks for your help!

I set the user-shares as exported read-only, and have the disk shares as hidden, but read/write.  You could do even more if individual users log on using specific IDs on PCs in the household, but for me and my wife, my scheme works perfectly fine.  The movies are read-only on the "Movies" share.    Everything else requires me to know the specific path to the disk share to write new files.

[Joe L.]

Any ideas or suggestions on best strategy to make files accessible and also decrease risk of deletion?

unRAID does not prevent you from deleting your own files, nor will it prevent you from losing data if a flood/tornado/lightning strike/fire that affects your server.  Backups are the only thing that will help, and even then they should be off-site.

 

Making certain shares read-only will work, or making them writable only by specific users will help, but again... unRAID protects you from data loss resulting from the failure of a single disk drive.  unRAID is not a backup...  It is reliable network storage.

[chuga]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I do know unraid is not meant to be a true backup, but I am just trying to get the most out of good configuration options that I can.  Your suggestions on read/write and hidden are good, and I will take a look at that (hiding disk shares and only having user shares visible).

 

I used a program I found someone on these forums to be able to add unraid shares to windows 7 libraries on other computers and that seems to be working well.

 

We do all login with different users in my house so I will look into options there also.

 

overall the first few days with unraid are going well and it is doing what I hoped.  I am particularly impressed with the speed.  I was concerned that media broswer on the HTPC would be slow loading in my library (versus having it on the local HTPC hard drive) but it is not.  Actually it seems a bit smoother loading in the libarary from the unraid server.

 

Next step....getting an extender and will try out PS3 media server on unraid!

 

thanks again for the help,

 

 

[WeeboTech]

I have an rsync backup shell that can backup a directory to another dated directory.

What is cool about rsync and linked-dest is that It keeps only 1 copy of a file if that file has not changed and if the file changes it will then keep that copy until it changes again.

 

so if you backup a directory on a daily basis, it will keep 1x of the current data.

and for each changed file it will keep another copy.

 

This you will always have a full backup of the directory over time along with changes over time until you start deleting the backup directories.

 

it can be set to backup daily, or do a daily backup but only keep changes per the last week's backup.

 

This tool is where i got my ideas from

http://www.math.ualberta.ca/imaging/rlbackup/

 

My tool rsync_linked_backup is available here http://code.google.com/p/unraid-weebotech/downloads/list

What my tool is missing is an expiration program. That's something you will need to devise yourself.

 

here's an example of the log screen output

root@atlas /mnt/disk2/backups/bin #./10_rsync_floppy_images    
Dec 07 12:42:41 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  Starting.
Dec 07 12:42:41 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  Conf:
Dec 07 12:42:41 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  Log: /mnt/disk2/backups/tftpboot/20111207/rsync_floppy_images.201112071242.log
Dec 07 12:42:41 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  backing up directory: underlord.cotrone.com:/var/tftpboot
Dec 07 12:42:41 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  Backing up changes since: 20110820
Dec 07 12:42:41 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  Backup to: /mnt/disk2/backups/tftpboot/20111207
The authenticity of host 'underlord.cotrone.com (192.168.1.251)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is cd:3f:a0:d4:30:86:1d:e9:9c:2c:f7:ee:40:8b:07:b8.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'underlord.cotrone.com,192.168.1.251' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Dec 07 12:43:01 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  Logfile: /mnt/disk2/backups/tftpboot/20111207/rsync_floppy_images.201112071242.log
Dec 07 12:43:01 atlas rsync_floppy_images[32709]:  Ending: RC: 0

 

example of the directory

 

root@atlas /mnt/disk2/backups/bin #cd /mnt/disk2/backups/tftpboot/
root@atlas /mnt/disk2/backups/tftpboot #ls -l
total 0
drwxr-sr-x 3 root 500 184 Aug 20 12:50 20110820/
drwxr-sr-x 3 root 500 128 Dec  7 12:43 20111207/
drwxr-sr-x 2 root 500  88 Jul 19  2010 log/

 

and a comparison of directories, in fact I may add this comparison to the script so that changes are logged somewhere.

 

root@atlas /mnt/disk2/backups/tftpboot #diff -q -r 20110820 20111207     
Only in 20110820: rsync_floppy_images.201108201239.log
Only in 20110820: rsync_floppy_images.201108201250.log
Only in 20111207: rsync_floppy_images.201112071242.log
Files 20110820/tftpboot/default and 20111207/tftpboot/default differ
Files 20110820/tftpboot/images/bzimage and 20111207/tftpboot/images/bzimage differ
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: bzimage.454
Files 20110820/tftpboot/images/bzimageb and 20111207/tftpboot/images/bzimageb differ
Files 20110820/tftpboot/images/bzroot and 20111207/tftpboot/images/bzroot differ
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: bzroot.454
Files 20110820/tftpboot/images/bzrootb and 20111207/tftpboot/images/bzrootb differ
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: gpartd
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: make_bootable.bat
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: riplinux-kernel32
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: riplinux-rootfs.cgz
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: syslinux.exe
Only in 20111207/tftpboot/images: win98se-bios-x7sbe.img
Files 20110820/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/C0A801FC and 20111207/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/C0A801FC differ
Files 20110820/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default and 20111207/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default differ